"For the past three decades, Robert Feintuch’s work has grappled with the male figure, using his own body to explore the comedies of masculinity, presumptions of power, and fallibility—as much his own as those of the human. The history of painting is never far from his mind." — A. J. Godetzky
Thomas Brambilla Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of the American artist Robert Feintuch (b. 1953). The exhibition, titled "Then and Now", presents a selection of work from 2003-2020 including two early cloud paintings.
The American painter Robert Feintuch lives and works in New York. Known for blending references to religious and mythological subjects in ways that have been seen as simultaneously vulnerable, heartfelt, and tragicomic, the artist has a long history of using himself as a model. Interested in the ways that gesture and posture speak, and often depicting himself seen from behind, the artist has modeled a range of poses, some naturalistic- or taken from the cartoons of his childhood- and others that make references to Bacchus, Hercules and the Assumption. Across many years, Feintuch has worked with mythological and religious images rooted in painting and sculpture that he sees as historically loaded.
"Then and Now", the artist's second exhibition with the gallery, presents a selection of work from 2003-2020 including two early cloud paintings. Feintuch began painting clouds in 1996, during a fellowship at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, following years of having worked exclusively in black and white. Physically limited while recovering from injuries sustained in a car accident, the artist began a series of small color studies on paper, seated in a chair looking out a window, working from direct observation of clouds over Lake Como. Gradually, clouds emerged as an important subject in his work- and they continue to play roles in his paintings today. Feintuch embraces metaphorical meaning, and clouds in his work have been seen as evoking natural processes, heaven, divine power and authority, and evanescence and mortality.
"Then and Now" also includes several paintings with fire buckets, an image Feintuch began working with in 1995. Early on, he came to see the fire bucket as suggestive of a sense of emergency, both personal and political. When he returned to the image in 2017, he felt that sense of political emergency as even more acutely apt. In Fire with Fire, Feintuch depicts an exaggerated exposed version of himself, clutching the bucket, bowing in front of an image of his painting Pontiff, a depiction of a hand with its index finger up in a position of authority. The artist has said, "For me there's something parodic about how that finger up in the air speaks to power and the preaching and moralism of our time". And there is ambiguity in the painting, in that the hand and arm in Pontiff can be read as Feintuch's own. Smoke is coming out of the bucket, which is turned so that it reads "IRE". In English, the idiom "fighting fire with fire" means retaliating against an opponent with the same method/weapons that the opponent uses.
In the paintings Kicking and Assumption Feintuch continues his long and ongoing history of working with images that refer to mortality. Another idiomatic phrase, "kicking the bucket," means dying, and in Kicking, 2018, Feintuch paints a bare foot kicking an empty fire bucket, turned again to read "IRE". In his luminous and evanescent painting Assumption, the artist depicts his own feet, seen from below, as if he is ascending to heaven.
Across the years, writers and curators have remarked on the seductive beauty of Feintuch's paintings, describing their glowing fresco-like color and surfaces, while simultaneously seeing them as "…mingling power and frailty, the tragic and the comic". Mario Codagnato, Sonnabend Collection, Mantova.
Writing in Posit, the poet Susan Lewis said, "One can no more look away from Robert Feintuch's paintings than from a miracle - or a shocking impropriety. In dialogue with Philip Guston and Samuel Beckett, Italian frescos and TV cartoons, Feintuch's work unites and juxtaposes high and low, humor and dread, playfulness and gravitas…(His) humor is humane as well as mordant, revealing the truth of ourselves to ourselves with a wry, sorrowful, sympathetic grin".
