Ho ho ho! A Christmas Surprise from Charbonnet

By Douglas MacCash, NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE

All art critics have some Ebenezer Scrooge in them. We wouldn’t mind at all seeing struggling artists working in their chilly, dark studios on Christmas Eve. Why should they misspend their time in the bosoms of their families, when there are paintings to be painted, sculptures to be sculpted? Art knows no holidays. As for critical generosity, bah, humbug. Why, there is nothing a real art critic would rather do than kick the crutches out from under a young artist’s expectations on Christmas Eve.

Nicole Charbonnet’s Suite of paintings at Galerie Simmone Stern seemed ideal for Yuletide bashing. Her large works were as full of clichés as a Christmas pudding is full of prunes. To begin with, she meant her paintings to have the appearance of graffiti found on a well-weathered urban wall. How often have we seen that? Her drawing style is as lose and clumsy as a 6-year-old’s. Aren’t we tired of darling faux-children’s art? Lastly, these works are self-conscious Post-modern pastiches. This was a show that had the potential to bore us until we were all as dead as doornails.

But, Charbonnet rose, like Marley’s ghost, above the painterly pitfalls. Yes, part of her style is an imitation of the peeling, distressed surfaces you find on telephone poles and boarded up store fronts that have been covered with layers of movie posters and rock ‘n’ roll fliers. But in Charbonnet’s hands this technique, which is usually used to indicate the complexity and grittiness of city life, seems gentler. It is as if the layers of news print and pages from children’s books she used to build up her papier mache surfaces were the overlapping veils of fond memory. You’ll find yourself searching these large pieces for glimmers of cartoon mice, thermos bottles and fingers on piano keys, as if they were daydreams you could reach out and touch.

Atop the softly ragged surfaces of her paintings, she scrawls brusque lettering and hurried drawings. Both unlike the 1980s, East Coast tagging it first suggests, Charbonnet’s graffiti is not composed of agitated, macho ranting. Instead, her pictures and captions are wry jokes, like Martini-dry Sunday comic strips. In “Matisse’s Dog,” for instance, she reproduced the modern master’s signature in huge, cardinal red script which looks a lot like the spray-painted autograph of a hip-hop-era vandal. The subtle humor here has something to do with how a one-time radical like Henri Matisse has become venerated and how contemporary curators and critics have tried to elevate graffiti artists to the same level.

In “Thirteen Most Wanted Women,” she wrote a block-letter shopping list that includes: Olympia, Ingre’s Bathers, Mona L., Madonna, Venus, Molly Bloom, etc. Each name is an art historical reference originally alluded to figures from mythology and religion. Beside the list she placed hazy renderings of Marilyn Monroe, Mother Mary and Princess Di. Here, Charbonnet intends to thoroughly muddy the cultural water. What do we think of first when we read “Madonna,” the polemical pop diva; paintings by Da Vinci, Van Eych, et al; or the mother of God? A very funny question.