Tatsuya McCoy: Hero Paintings
at Jan Cicero Gallery, through
Signal similarly combines abstraction and cultural allusion. Most of this large canvas is black, and from close-up it has the heaviness and mass of many heroic abstractions of yore. But step back, and at the top and bottom curved patches of yellow convert the blackness into the symbol of Batman, still massive and a bit scary since the wings seem to stretch beyond the painting’s edge. There’s an elegant pictorial ambiguity to Signal; as McCoy says, one would expect to experience the black as a void, but “if you see the symbol, the yellow becomes the negative space and black becomes positive.” It’s part of McCoy’s postmodernism that his paintings aren’t meant to work solely on the basis of their designs but are best understood through their references to mass culture–Batman or Spider-Man–a reading that converts their initially mysterious forms into, well, objects. Yet the paintings’ formal precision and the pictorial weight he gives these symbols make them subtler than flat comic-book imagery.
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What Williams does now is reevaluate the American west in paintings informed by revisionist historians like Patricia Nelson Limerick and William L. Katz, who point out that the African-Americans in the west were mysteriously omitted from earlier histories. If McCoy is a geometric minimalist, Williams is a maximalist, combining a multitude of abstract shapes, evocative objects, and figures. The nine paintings in this show, four portraits and five collagelike works, depict Native Americans, African-Americans, and symbols from both cultures. His works aren’t as strongly focused as McCoy’s, but I found myself in sympathy with their messy, somewhat undecided quality: this is the art of someone still searching, not judging.
