Fantastic, Detailed, Masterful…
Douglas Bourgeois at the Top of His Game
By Doug MacCash, Art critic, NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE
Douglas Bourgeois is one of the most talented and poetic artists in Louisiana, or anywhere else.
Paintings like those on view at Arthur Roger Gallery through April 24-hypnotically complicated, obsessively busy oils, peopled with pop-culture icons-are the bricks from which Bourgeois’ reputation is built. In a weirdly comic piece titled “Ghost of a Crooner” for instance, a beautiful female apartment dweller is startled into spilling her cheese puffs and Pepsi by the shimmering shade of Dean Martin.
In another odd bit of painterly storytelling titled “Joan Jett Fan and Bat Kid,” we find a young mother dressed like leather rocker Joan Jett, posed she-hero-like on the edge of a forbidding forest that is right out of “Where the Wild Things Are” (a darkly-drawn children’s book by Maurice Sendak). The star-struck mom, armed only with a brightly enameled electric guitar, stands ready to protect her boy-child, dressed in Batman pajamas, from whatever terrors might befall him in the woods.
A fanatically detailed composition called “Bird Communion” is the hybrid of a 1950s nature guide and a Byzantine religious icon. In it, the miniature portrait of local artist and ecologist Jacqueline Bishop floats amid the heads of birds in an avian aurora around a cruciform icon of Mother Earth, all of which hovers over a postcard depicting a clear-cut forest.
Again, Bourgeois demonstrates his ability to weave bizarre incidents that he might have found in grocery store tabloids with allegories out of the Book of Matthew. His impeccable style remains a mixture of fastidious, miniaturist painting, with a diabolically stiff and clumsy drafting style. He is a mature master at the top of his game.
Some gallery-goers may be surprised to discover full-blown still-lifes and paintings based on collages amid Bourgeois’ familiar narrative works. Actually these meticulously rendered collections of everyday objects have always existed in the backgrounds of his vignettes. Bourgeois forever gave the shelves of an open refrigerator, a crowded bedroom counter top or Victorian floral wallpaper the same loving attention that he spent on the portrait of one of his heroes.
Bourgeois is now allowing himself to put his love of clutter center stage. And splendid clutter it is. The painting “Double Luck,” for instance, is a painfully congested, shallow still-life on tin toys, postage stamps, persimmons, frozen food packages and on and on and on. If there is anything negative to say about this piece, it is that it’s like a dessert that is almost too rich to eat. Similarly, “Inventions” is a gorgeously claustrophobic painting of the war toys of little boys, blended with images of industry and religious articles.
The show also includes 27 small still-lifes painted in gouache. Each painting is composed of three or four diminutive objects: an exotic match box, a pack of candy cigarettes and a tea cup, for instance. These careful renderings of intimate childhood wonderments tug at our heartstrings, but neither the airy compositions, nor the tentative aqueous painting technique holds up very well, especially when compared to the glittering oil masterpieces across the gallery floor.
Perhaps the most promising elements of this exhibit are a few paintings such as “Black Cat-Missy Elliot” in which Bourgeois seems to have papered over the fantastically attentive portraits of pop-stars (in this case, rapper Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot) from his earlier narratives with the layers of charming trash from his newer still-lifes. These integrated pieces are illustrations of an artistic mind that remains plastic, instead of becoming stale. They are crucial visual experiments that portend more great things to come.