Clayton Brothers: Wishy Washy

Bellwether, May 18- June 24 3006

Animated by the pulsating and polychromatic canvases of the Clayton Brother’s show is a battle of sartorial (perhaps, social?) sanitation. The figures populating each image are embodied through an elaborate stylized visual vocabulary. This style veers close to the sort of cartoon-y illustration that could easily sell tee-shirts or shoes, but luckily through this paradigm the brothers manage to produce a carnivalesque, rather than commercial, commentary. The exaggerated figurations shift attention from issues of verisimilitude to the complex negotiation between form and content, between narrative and technique. And there is something immensely satisfying when form and content coalesce so tightly and cleverly, and even more so when they push against each other. This tension is produced expertly in this series, as the form given to content—and the content imbued in formalistic devices—highlight their radical distinction as well as their Mobius Strip-like interdependence.

The paintings of Wishy Washy are populated by an array of characters, some strangely colored and others experiencing hirsute transformations. They exist in a strangely abstract space, nominally a Laundromat: messy and expressive artist’s marks such as smears and drips of paint ooze off the figures, as slick geometric abstractions—rays, diamonds, circles, paisley globules, floral loops, linear 3-d constructions—intersect the picture plane. The relationship between the abstract and figurative elements is complex; alternately existing in radical separation, and implicated in an intimate co-production. This correspondence/contradistinction is pushed further by the ever-changing variety of marks and textures employed. A spray paint can in one of the fantastic humanoid’s hands radiates a fine mist of airbrushed paint, while oversized ink droppers corresponds with a different class of mark-making. The interest is created by this variety of marks—impasto, slick, modeled, drippy, and sprayed. This diversity of surface is matched by an equally overwhelming range of palettes, from glaring neons and supersaturated brights, to realistic neutrals and grungy fatigues. These tonal groups are employed sensitively to the canvas; slick neon rays contrast with rough complexly modulated skin tones.

The characters endlessly produce and are produced by the conventions of abstraction figured in each image. The relationship between the abstract elements and the figurative/narrative ones shifts between overlay, penetration, interaction, and production. Geometric diamonds, which exist in purely abstract space, lacking any intelligible interaction with the figurative elements of one canvas reappear in another canvas being physically carted about by another figure. Non-objective configuration of circles that float over groups of people become, elsewhere, tactile objects held in grotesque humanoid hands.

Cleverly modified and faithfully reproduced vintage signs and texts emerge periodically, vaguely referring race relations, social commentary, and artistic programs through the language of Laundromats. An entreaty to “Lysol Yourself” is reinforced by the ever-present figure of bleach. Meanwhile, the cry of “Color for the people” doubles with repeated eyedroppers and spray paint cans manipulated by, and perhaps creating, the figures. An narrative emerges, playfully suggesting a war between the sanitizing effects of banality and the messiness of bohemianism, between conservative cleanliness and artistic production, or on another register, between racial whitewashing and affirmation of diversity, between so-called purity and dynamic exchange. But the model of identity is linked inextricably to the methods and modes of representation; identity is not fixed, static, inherent, but endlessly produced, modified, and transformed. This production is brought to the fore by the aforementioned attention on the tools, acts, and traces of artistic production: the prominence of a variety of marks, the shifting registers of abstraction and figuration, the symbols of paint and product actively engaged by the narrative elements of each image.

In this battle between colors and bleach, dust bunnies and disinfectant, the stakes are surprisingly high. The style and content bring in an element of kitsch and graffiti to “high art”—in fact, they infect it. Corporeal mutations abound, as figures flicker in and out of grotesqueries, hovering in the space between affirmation and disintegration. The promise of the “white cube,” not to mention the godliness of cleanliness, is refigured as a threat, and is under attack by a polymorphous force of playful creation. The colorful cast of characters poses serious questions of social relations and artistic relations, simultaneously and fantastically.