JAMES VERBICKY: SHEEPLE MAY SAFELY GRAZE

By Peter Frank, August 2009

 

In his abstract painting, James Verbicky constructs a complex sense of space and motion that thrums with a sense of discovery and revelation. In his new series of representational works, works whose figurative imagery clearly evinces a basis in photo-text conceptualism, Verbicky conveys just the opposite sensation. In these reworkings of recognizable, and recognizably appropriated, sources Verbicky recontextualizes and reworks images found in mass media so that they take on a new, strangely enhanced resonance, a highly rarefied meaning whose intricacy distances them emphatically from the banality of their origins.

 

This, of course, is classic Pop art strategy. But Verbicky is one of a growing number of neo-Pop painters who invest their common-object and common-image painting with ambiguity, ambivalence, and even post-modern malaise. Working on the other side of momentous (not to say calamitous) events from the original Pop era, and on the other side of a new visual sophistication driven by the evolution of visual media ranging from the Internet to comicbooks, neo-Pop artists such as Verbicky do not simply make social commentary with their art; they presume that their approach, reliant on and yet resistant to popular culture, will comment upon the conditions of the day. No longer able to shock the bourgeoisie, they want more than ever to communicate with them through paintings that can no longer disturb but more than ever can puzzle. The enigma, Verbicky and his contemporaries believe, is stronger than the affront.

 

The very allure of Verbicky's imagery is in its equally forceful qualities of familiarity and mystery. What has motivated Verbicky to choose these images (rather than myriad others he could have chosen) as his anti-icons? Where do these images come from, and, however familiar they might seem, why don't they look more familiar? Why do they seem so unsettling in their very familiarity, as if they were desperately trying to tell us something they finally cannot? Do we see ourselves in them? Are they strange in their banality, or banal in their strangeness? Who are these people?

 

We can easily tell the general origins of these images in newspapers and other, mostly static mass media, perhaps in advertising, perhaps in other parts of the publications in question. What we can't tell is what specifically they used to mean before Verbicky tore them from their original contexts. The artist is not playing an inside joke on most of us by winking at a select few; he clues none of us into his particular sources, and, if anything, his hints are misleading. Along with the black-and-white palette in the multipanel painting of heads, for instance, the writing - French words, Polish names - indicates that this composite image appeared in a French newspaper and concerned Polish air pilots of some sort. Although we can make a connection to Verbicky's Polish family name (which was indeed a motivating factor), we're left with no hint of his reason, of his "message" or of what the original news story related - or even if it was a news story (rather than a movie ad or the like).

Verbicky doesn't hide the message he wishes to convey to us through these images; simply by calling his new series of representational paintings "Sheeple" he is clearly signaling his criticism of the unthinking responses, the habits, we indulge ourselves in as participants in mass consumerism. As the artist writes, "My imagery is intended to depict the perverse giddiness of self-gratification in the face of self-destruction. The "Sheeple" of the world are still, through all our advances, following eachother to collect their food pellets, penned in by an electric fence of perceived and ingrained obligation and political rhetoric."

 

Verbicky does not delight in the "visual culture" of consumerism, as did the original Pop artists, but regards it with alarm, despair, and no little fury. He sees it, and employs it, as a symptom of our uncritical, self-debasing collusion in a wasteful, bread-and-circuses civilization, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle in which the spectacle is that of us in the feverish and abject process of consuming.

 

But there is an almost lyrical poetry to these images in the way Verbicky has appropriated and modified them. They remain mysterious, despite his social message, because they transcend that message. Their obliquely familiar images leave us uneasy, but also leave us vaguely enchanted. These paintings are not lectures or sermons on the evils of mindless consumption, but are stories- novels, perhaps, told about those who consume and, more specifically, those who are consumed by the need to consume. Although never glorious, their fate is not always dire, and their plight can be droll rather than simply pitiable. James Verbicky is a painter of strange comedy, not pathetic tragedy, and his outlook, as, indeed, his commitment to making art itself is, finally, optimistic. Our present condition could be worse, he reasons, and, thus, it can be better. Art, Verbicky further demonstrates, can alert us to the possibility, and the urgency, of that betterment.

 

 

________________________

 

 

Peter Frank is the Senior Curator at the Riverside ArtMuseum, an art critic for Angeleno Magazine, and a long-time critic for LA Weekly. He was a past editor of Visions Art Quarterly, and was a critic for The Village Voice and The SoHo Weekly News in New York. Frank contributes articles to numerous publications and has organized many theme and survey shows for placement at institutions throughout the world. He has taught at colleges and universities and has lectured all over North America and Europe. Frank received his B.A. and M.A. in art history from Columbia University.