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The sexually ambiguous relationship between portraitists
and their subjects has generated no small measure of purple prose
through the centuries. What was going on between Leonardo da Vinci and
his Mona Lisa, or Jan Vermeer and his Girl With a Pearl Earring?
In this context, it's noteworthy
that Portland artist Gregory Grenon, renowned for his erotically charged
paintings of women, doesn't use real, live models; he paints from his
imagination. And what an imagination it is. Truth Is a Lie and Anger Follows
is tart, sassy and wholly unbeholden to any conception of feminism.
Like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Grenon is obsessed with painting
youngish women in garish colors and confrontational poses that
accentuate their vulnerability.
The girl in Getting Inaccessible woozily swills a cocktail, her eyes in a stupor. The girl in Esteemed and Intense has a black eye, while the girl in The Arrogance sits defiantly on a stool, her legs spread in that particular way that girls are taught never to sit. There's a trashed-out skankiness in the louche posture of the Courtney Love look-alike in Truth Is a Lie. Grenon has finger-painted the woman's skin; his black fingerprints cover her arms, chest, neck and face.
Literally and metaphorically, he's had his hands all over her. Dressing Room shows a saleswoman tape-measuring the bust of a girl in a pink negligee, initiating her into a world in which a woman's self-worth and bra size are all too often linked.
What's the takeaway
from this unrelenting male gaze? Certainly not female empowerment. But
Grenon's paintings succeed as meta-commentaries on the fuzzy lines that
separate looking from leering. He challenges us to untangle our
responses to the retrograde conception of women embedded in his
paintings. If there were any doubt that Grenon revels in this ambiguity,
it's erased by his title for a painting of a girl lounging on a green
chair, the neckline of her red dress plunging, one leg hiked up, arm
raised coquettishly to her shoulder. It's called I Am Not My Paintings, and My Paintings Are Not Me.
SEE IT: Truth Is a Lie and Anger Follows is at Laura Russo Gallery, 805 NW 21st Ave., 226-2754. Through Nov. 29.
WWeek 2015