ART IN REVIEW: JIM RICHARD – ”DECOR”

by Ken Johnson, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Collector's Corner, 2000

With deadpan irony, Jim Richard meditates on one of the modern artist’s main moral challenges: how to reconcile spiritual aspirations and material desires. One solution, practiced by artists as various as Thomas Trosch and Louise Lawler, is to nip the hand of the feeder. So Mr. Richard, who is based in New Orleans and has been exhibiting his work since the mid-1970’s, makes quietly satiric paintings of rooms in the homes of art collectors. The images are based, apparently, on photographs from interior design magazines. He simplifies and abstracts his sources into cartoonish, Pop-style pictures marked by satiny smooth surfaces, muted colors, smoldering light and Cubist complication.

In the paintings, generic two- and three-dimensional Modernist works appear on walls, pedestals and fireplace mantels, serving as decorative accents in ostentatiously overfurnished rooms. Objects once animated by purely aesthetic, spiritual, utopian, revolutionary or other sorts of ideals become risible emblems of acquisitiveness, retrograde taste and vanity. These are the places where art goes to die.

You may sense, beneath Mr. Richard’s mordant wit, deeper feelings of ambivalence, doubt and melancholia. Few artists don’t hope to be patronized by discerning collectors, but it is deflating to think that becoming kitschy high-end décor is the best most works of art can hope for.