“Dexter Dalwood.” Flash Art International 37:238 (October 2004): 125.
Dexter Dalwood at Gagosian Gallery. June 24-July 30, 2004
Melissa Pearl Friedling
British painter, Dexter Dalwood, arrived with nine new paintings for his first solo show in New York in the champagne and caviar style of Chelsea’s Gagosian Gallery -- a style that the subjects of his paintings would indeed be accustomed to. Dalwood’s paintings repeatedly demonstrate that the artist is remarkably at home in the unoccupied, imagined spaces of the rich and infamous – from British spy, Anthony Blunt to accused wife murdering aristocrat, Claus Von Bulow.
While Dalwood’s contemporary take on history painting is marginally novel, a more interesting parasitical project within Dalwood’s work is the combining, mixing, and deliberate quoting of painters and painting movements broadly related to the notorious subject of the painting. His references are at times obvious and specific – Matisse, de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, -- and at times more allusions to the visual vocabularies developed throughout the 20th century.
The post-impressionist/cubist/abstract expressionist push/pull play with pictorial space is most striking in the three landscapes included in the show. For example, the 2003 painting titled The Velvets (referencing the maverick cult band, The Velvet Underground) appropriates the distinctively vertical, jagged bolts of black paint a-la “American School” abstract expressionist, Clyfford Still. In Dalwood’s composition, these immense color areas become soaring facades, falling in front and behind the narrow yellow canyon-like triangle of street that approaches illusionistic depth but is disrupted by the addition of an enigmatic “waiting-for-my-man” phone booth.
What is consistent in all the works is Dalwood’s own painterly technique of taping off areas around objects and creating lozenge-shaped bas-relief-style hard-edges – itself, a tried and true borrowed technique. Ultimately, just as the success of Dalwood’s history paintings are contingent upon the subject’s recognizability and gossipy appeal, his use of already processed visual spaces finds its limit at offering new ways of thinking about painting.