Sins of the Flesh

Visual vespers at SAMA
by Elaine Wolff, SAN ANTONIO CURRENT

[EXCERPT]

Porcini, 2004

It’s an intensely graphic month at the San Antonio Museum of Art, where antique suppurating martyrs are countered by modern meat, splayed, ground, stacked, and photographed for consumption.

I’m a fan of the bacon, but most of the subjects of David Halliday’s still-life photographs are actually vegetables, and in both his sepia-toned black-and-white images and more recent full-color prints, his composition moves from Old Master homage to contemporary abstraction, in which zucchini and peppers are reduced to shape and color against two-toned backgrounds. They’re stylized and eye-catching, and only occasionally tip into absurdity in some of the transitional compositions, like the almost hilarious “Still Life With Dorian Fruit,” which looks like a study for a Muppets musical number. But “Banana (Diptych)” from 1995, fits right in the post-Duchamp sculpture tradition.

Of these, I like the Old Master numbers best, the way Halliday captures the tactile decadence of painting, the time-frozen quality of still life, and the bittersweet holiness of transience with more feeling than many of his fellow contemporary-still-life practitioners. In “Zucca Grande,” a gargantuan, pockmarked pumpkin looms over a pebble-like snail and fig, and a tiny bee tests credulity. And in 2007’s “Bread House,” the composition is classic sci-fi, but parts of the palette are pure Dutch.

Sardines, 2004

Halliday’s really weird photos are the best, even if the magic of fetishization — an intense sensory fusion of temptation, indulgence, and rebuke — only works in small doses. He displays singular or simply paired foodstuffs in morally bankrupt beauty inside a claustrophobic lightbox lit from the right through a frosted circle, and produced as sepia-toned silver-gelatin prints. An octopus unfurls like brocaded petticoats waiting to be despoiled. A cut salami rests atop a glistening slab of bacon as if it’s won the wrestling match. “Sardines,” from 2004, are stacked like ingots in a silver cup, while “Porcini,” also 2004, balance precariously against the walls, defeated Titans, dazed by battle.