Jay Kelly
at Walsh
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Kelly also uses traditional symbols to a different effect than one might expect. The perfectly symmetrical black cross against a light tan background in Untitled #1127 isn’t a Christian cross and doesn’t have quite the right proportions for the Red Cross’s logo or for the white cross at the center of the Swiss flag. Denying viewers specific referents pushes them to think about the impact of symbols, particularly since the composition is made asymmetrical by an almost white band at the bottom. Untitled #1243 also challenges expectations, giving us a maze of nearly white rectangles on a bluish background that at first made me think of sunlight cast on a wall through a window. But there are way too many rectangles, and they’re of different shades. Almost every element of traditional abstract painting–the sense of certitude, the idea that specific shapes are being used for specific reasons and that perfection in design can be achieved–is being undermined here.
The path Kelly took to becoming an abstract artist helps explain his ability to make something new of a genre that’s been thoroughly worked over. He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, making realistic drawings and paintings as a child. Figuring he couldn’t make a living as a fine artist, he studied advertising at Syracuse University. “Fortunately,” he says, he was fired from his first advertising job. He soon found a gallery that wanted his photorealist paintings of industrial New Jersey landscapes. Key to his brand of trompe l’oeil was learning to paint with soft edges that imitated the look of a photographic print, and by the early 90s he was getting more and more meticulous, often taking almost a year to complete a small watercolor.
Kim says, “I am interested in tattoo as a metaphor for hidden desire or a kind of compulsion engraved into human consciousness.” But his painted body parts are creepy. They have bulges and belly buttons, but almost nothing is recognizably human–and some fragments have more than one belly button. A tattoo on a person can bring fetishistic attention to a single part of the body, and Kim’s weird fragments lift this notion into the hyperbolic.
