For More images of the exhibition see the Friedrich Petzel site.
The idea of the artist’s studio transferred into the gallery is a relatively familiar one. As this show demonstrates, however, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a good one. Part of this has to do with the nature of studios. Artists studios are always an object of fascination for art lovers. Studios are the machines that we build to build our work. Great art is likely to be the product of an interesting machine. Our studios, like our houses and apartments, are also products of how we organize our minds.
Here the studio detritus is included along with several of Pensato’s white and black enamel paintings. Scattered throughout the gallery, on the floor or piled on stools and milk crates is a large collection of stuffed animals, found images, drawings, photographs, and toys. Most of them are characters that appear in her paintings. All of them are spattered with her black and white enamal paint, as if catching flack from any number of intense painting sessions. Most of them look filthy too - as if they’ve been kicking around on the floor of an art studio for years (as they undoubtably have.) Some of her milk-crates and stools have enamal hardened on them like shiny black icicles. Most impressively, there’s an astonishingly huge chunk of accumulated enamel paint (several inches think and large enough to cover a wide swatch of studio floor.)
What’s wonderful about this, as is often the case with artists’ studios, is that the machine that she’s built to build her work (her studio), is so of-a-piece with her work itself that it almost renders the paintings themselves a bit extraneous. Fortunately, that’s not the case. If the paintings couldn’t be made without all the bizarre accoutrements of Pensato’s studio then it’s also true to say that her studio couldn’t have been made without the paintings. Here, they reinforce and inform each other. They show us a lot about how she makes her work and even more about why she would in the first place.
It’s nearly impossible not to see Pensato’s work in relation to Mike Kelley’s, especially in light of his recent death. Kelley famously examined the pathos of dingy stuffed animals. However, where Kelley only ever made anti-paintings and explicitly rejected and the attitudes of Modernist painting, Pensato has found that the tools of painterly abstraction could be quite effectively brought to bear on the problem of exploring these characters’ weird combination of charm and abjection. If there’s an immediate art-historical source for Pensato’s painterly technique it’s probably De Koonings black and white enamel paintings from the late forties. By melding Kelley’s unusual concerns with some serious painterly chops, Pensato seems to reveal something about the expressive force of both. While these projects might have seemed at one time diametrically opposed (Kelley once spoke, figuratively, of his “figure/ground” oriented art school training as a type of “trauma”), Pensato has shown us how surprisingly compatible they might actually be.
Her resolutely controlled figure ground relationships force us to see the simple, stark out-line of these characters as if for the first time. The black and white areas tend to flip back and forth between their status as positive or negative space. The intensity of her brushwork, the drips, and the anguished simplified expressions not only evoke German Expressionism but also transmute some of its power. They seem less like cartoon characters in this context and more like spectres of our own subconscious – the rage-filled cartoon duck inside of us all. Cartoon characters, by their nature, are usually presented as slick brightly colored illustration or shiny plastic objects. This belies the fact that the emotions they access in us might not be so neat. The intensity of her mark-making, and her proficiency with these materials helps to reinforce and accentuate some of the darker, latent content of these characters. Rather than an ironic exercise, this seems like an appropriate form of redemption. Donald Duck’s angry, dark soul never looked so good.
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