In Recreation Myths, Jackie Gendel’s first mid-career retrospective, dynamic color drenched oil paintings forcefully assert the pleasure of the decorative, even as they question the act of painting and the ideal of creative freedom associated with it. Throughout these paintings, Gendel asks in different ways, and from different angles: “Is one free to create the self, or is one always scaffolded?” The architectural metaphor which structures her language equally shapes her work, which unfolds in the shadows of the avant-garde city, in an interim space between inside and outside, private and public. For Gendel, the notion of “creation myths” refers less to ancient or archetypal cultural narratives than to how each individual creates the self in ways that purport to be free (that is, freely chosen). This is the ideal of self-creation that runs from Socrates to the “self-made” human of the post Enlightenments world. If Gendel’s title implies that private self-creation is a myth, it may be because our choices, if not our actual selves, are largely determined by public “scaffoldings” that are often opaque to us. If so, how much remains for an individual to create, or to recreate?
Here, through painting, a medium of both creation and obliteration, layering and erasure, Gendel revisits key early twentieth-century modernist motifs and gambits as she works through the place of women in the paintings of Post-Impressionists like Marie Laurencin, Ernst Kirchner, Francis Picabia, Pierre Bonnard, Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Leger, and Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Women, the iconic subject of the period, lounge on the grass, and pose theatrically. But they also step out into the public sphere, beneath Classical archways. Or the framing arch toggles ninety degrees, as in The Archers, where women take aim as architects of their own fate.
Throughout, these daughters of modernism sport the flamboyant color and rowdy pattern of the iconic paintings of the early teens and twenties. But note how these women’s exaggerated poses underscore the artificiality of their role playing. This overt theatricality returns us to Gendel’s structuring question around the possibilities of making, unmaking, and re-creating the self. And ultimately, to the question of how fashioning the self might be imagined through the language of paint.
Leora Maltz-Leca, Curator, Redwood Contemporary Arts Initiative
Exhibition generously supported by BankNewport Charitable Foundation
