Young Artist Hobnobs With the Old Masters

Among younger artists in New York who are currently generating lots of enthusiastic ink, 36-year-old John Currin is somewhere near the top of the heap. Judging from his most recent paintings, including the five now at Regen Projects in West Hollywood, it’s easy to see why: Currin has lately grown into a painter of remarkable sophistication.

Think Lucas Cranach’s “Eve” merged with a Vargas pinup girl, and you’ll have some idea of the luscious eye-gouging his best pictures can deliver. Currin marshals paint as a sensuous lure, and his work from 1998 and 1999 shows him becoming manually adept with a wide repertoire of Old Master-ish effects: luminous flesh emerging from tobacco-brown darkness, hair decoratively arrayed in space as if held aloft by an unseen breeze, transparent veils placed over creamy skin in a delicious echo of oil paint glazed over canvas.

These technical effects, often exquisitely achieved, are accompanied by pointed references to any number of artists and paintings from the European canon: the anatomical fictions (extra vertebrae in the spine, boneless fingers, swan-like necks) that Ingres made nonetheless convincing to your eye, the mute sign language performed by Botticelli’s carefully deployed hands, the solemn eroticism and sloe-eyed mysteriousness of Northern Renaissance art, even the whole category of female nude as primary subject. Currin weaves these assorted (and sometimes conflicting) elements together into a seamless whole. When, in the most remarkable work, an attenuated older woman cups the belly of a younger one in her impossibly long fingers, the annunciation that’s implied declares the birth of a distinctly modern mutation.

Usually, our late 20th century information glut is discussed as a maelstrom (or dung heap) filled with endless texts and oceans of pictorial reproductions. Both are certainly indicated here, in acutely self-conscious pictures that possess inescapable overtones of the fashion magazine and the fraught discourse of a male artist choosing to make representations of female bodies.

But, for Currin’s art, the info glut also embraces something new to our day--namely, the unprecedented volume of contemporary experience of historical paintings, fostered by cheap international travel and the proliferation of museums. No potentate of the past ever saw a fraction of the paintings that the average art world denizen does today.

One result is that Currin’s paintings conjure those precedents as a necessary component of a vital dialogue. (Cranach might be dead these 400 years, but Cranach’s miraculous “Eve” is not.) His paintings are about the specific images represented, but they are also about painting as an enterprise. The dense cultural codes and social networks given body by oil smeared on cloth form a legacy that Currin plainly means to extend.

The grinning, wide-eyed faces on so many of his women make them seem besotted, even slightly goofy. Part of the kick of Currin’s art is in knowing how deeply those faces reflect your own giddy experience of painting, which finally has something to do with love.

* Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424, through Feb. 27. Closed Sundays and Mondays.