Wallpaper This
Josh George‘s paintings may seem to be simple figures and cityscapes. They can feel like illustrations, and the figures sometimes seem stylized and cartoonlike. But they’re not so easily dismissed — the collage-based work reveals itself to be physically and emotionally nuanced. George is a Kansas City Art Institute graduate for whom everyday stuff and situations are worthy of closer scrutiny.
George now lives in Brooklyn, where his influences include the city and its detritus of daily living — notes from his wife, a receipt. However, most of the collage in his paintings comes from old books of wallpaper samples. The unexpected color and texture and the surprising patterns emerging in an arm or a leg infuse George’s paintings with visual surplus and curiosity. His exhibition at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art is impressively stocked; it includes large paintings as well as tiny ones that are abstract and loose.
In “Adored and Composed at Ease,” a sleeping girl (George often uses himself and his wife as models) lies on her side. Through her blue-green skin — skin doesn’t seem to be an actual human color in a George painting — the wallpaper patterns emerge to create conflict between ordinary figure study and abstraction. As the girl lies on a patterned fleur-de-lis and a blanket covers her, George alternates the stripes of the wallpaper with painted stripes, heightening tension between the collage elements and the painted elements. It takes a minute to discern the collage from the paint. This subtle shifting between the two suggests George’s prowess as an illusionist: The girl’s hair is a mixture of paint and a subtle wallpaper pattern that, when isolated from the rest of the painting, reveals a completely abstract passage.
George’s paintings also can tend toward the oddly poetic. In “Bird Nanny,” a portrait of a girl eating in a bistro, her bowl is full of baby birds with their mouths agape. Gazing off into the distance, she seems unaware, which makes the scene even more gratifyingly weird. Yet the main character here is really the floor. George’s floor dominates the painting in a fascinating way that recalls French Impressionist Caillebotte’s 1875 painting “The Floor Scrapers.” There, the workers scrape the floor to reveal the bare wood; here, the paint is scraped to reveal the wallpaper collage beneath the paint.
Cityscapes round out George’s arsenal of images. In “Voracious Vehemence,” a typical New York City scene — a wall of buildings — gives way in the bottom third of the painting to complete abstraction, a chaotic and riotous collage and paint mixture from which the buildings emerge, floating on a foundation of instability. That instability is in all of George’s work.
Elsewhere in the gallery, Japanese-American photographer Mimi Kato’s work stands out in a terrific small-group exhibition called Up Close and Personal. Texas-based Kato’s computer-generated images of herself in costume draw from the Japanese folk tales she heard as a child. These animal stories were steeped in wisdom and life lessons, both of which seem absent from daily life, according to Kato. By photographing herself dressed in costume with animal masks and creating scroll-like narrative works, she rescues storytelling and the core ideas of this Japanese tradition. Her reinterpretation feels fresh and unencumbered.
