January 2009, Alan Reid at Lisa Cooley Fine Art

Alan Reid at Lisa Cooley Fine Art

Heiresses on Terraces



November 22 until December 28, 2008

Nyc painter Alan Reid softly pummels the expectations of figuration with whimsy and snarling formal aptitudes in his debut solo show at the Lisa Cooley Gallery.  The canvases hold sensitive color pencil deposits of disappearing line qualities, setting a drifting frame of psychoanalytic humor. His world is one of flamboyance through the expected seriousness and pretension of posture. Reid holds the cool hand as a disappearing author of his fantasies where panties perch on heads, equestrian apparatus weightlessly float, and exotic beasts attack. Cued by late gothic clumsiness and disappearing frescos, he eliminates imperative and authority to seek pure empirical figure painting bliss. The cliché and associative drives around the painter’s premise of male emotions is an impotent stage that may sway the viewer to a new plateau of authenticity. This is where the fun begins for viewers who chose to commit to the reasoning, provocation, and negotiation in his scenarios. ‘Feeling’ and the ambiguous origins of desire lay in props, attire, furniture, and suggestively transgender figures. In posing proper the heiresses become awkward but challenged by exotic tragedies they embody and experience. Alan’s cinematic nostalgia teamed with archetypal male libido has figures placed in the appropriate gaze. Puns abound. The real juicy juice may be in the connoisseurship of still life knick-knacks and fashion fatalities. There is a terse heckling he invites and joins as he politely sidesteps any heavy-handed authorship spotlight. Negation of self, and efficiency of delivery are an attempt to be as generous as possible. The self-reflexive style and content is best summed in the ‘Trojan horse’ where the veiled is delivered.