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Whereas Maureen Dougherty is usually often called an abstractionist, she studied figurative portray, and has returned to it repeatedly all through her profession. And when the Covid-19 lockdown remoted her in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for 2 years, the determine got here again prominently to the fore, as we see in “Borrowed Time,” the artist’s exhibition right here. Nearly all of the canvases are portraits and fêtes galantes, whose topics possess the appropriately worshipful and hopeless gaze of Watteau’s dancers, his commedia dell’arte inventory characters, his courtly lovers enveloped within the haziest sfumato, and that different fêtes galantes look (altogether extra carnal and intentionally, inappropriately, understanding), with scenes and eventualities calling to thoughts Marcantonio Raimondi’s erotic illustrations for Pietro Aretino to the Marquis de Sade’s much less radical, extra “workably” porno confrères, akin to Restif de la Bretonne. All soiled photos, all agreeably social.
Dougherty presents varied episodes from a sure philosophie dans le boudoir which might be pervy of their beautiful modesty: Take Younger Asian with Pansy and iPhone, 2023, a nude determine of indeterminate sexual orientation and gender presentation. Their membrum virile appears to be like relatively shy. The place’s my wrap?, the topic appears to inquire—the work’s pentimenti and painterly mist gives one. Dougherty has remarked that the background for this portray is kind of completely different from my explicit extrapolation, as it’s primarily based on an incident of anti-Asian hatred she witnessed on the New York subway. Her bizarrely aestheticized tackle such violence imbues the composition’s softness with greater than a contact of evil—its perfumes are unmistakably bitter, poisoned.
These preponderantly French-y references are very a lot pointed: the artist’s better program each in “formal gestures” and iconography is redolently, resolutely Francophile: Matisse reigns supreme in Dougherty’s referential aerie, together with Bonnard’s decaying nudes within the bathtub, Marie Laurencin’s most intimate buddies and, throughout the Atlantic, Walt Kuhn’s circus folks and Alex Katz’s urbane milieu. The artist’s perverse figuration is decidedly Gustonesque, however it’s articulated with a frillier model of his Grand Guignol.
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