May 12, 2005
Fowl images
Doug Argue pecks away at
conceptions of painting and its object
By THERESA BEMBNISTER
Special to The Star
Why did the chicken cross the road?
To get to Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art gallery, where San Francisco-based artist
Doug Argue presents portraits of poultry through Saturday.
Argue found inspiration during a visit to a Chuck Close exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York, where the artist imagined a chicken portrait among
the paintings of Close's closest friends.
“ It made me laugh,” Argue said. “Most things that make me
laugh I end up doing.”
Like Close's famous portraits, Argue's paintings are large-scale canvases with
a close-up view of the subject's
neck and face.
“ I don't know if I find things that are always trying to please me interesting or beautiful,” Argue said.
These foul fowl are so repulsive they are gruesomely attractive. In one portrait the chicken cocks its head to one side, peering quizzically out from the canvas. Its neck and head are wrinkled mounds of bloated pink flesh, reminiscent of Jabba the Hutt. Argue paints a series of thick, red, green, blue and gray stripes in the background.
“ I try to make images that are uniquely mine, and I try to make them as historically interesting as possible,” he said. “I'm inserting an image that is not traditional within the idea of painting.”
The portraits may be ugly, but they are smartly executed and sprinkled with intelligent art historical references. The background of each portrait references different styles of painting, from abstract expressionism, to color field and Renaissance portraiture.
“ Even though the image of the chicken is the same, the characters of the paintings are quite different,” Argue said.
In one portrait the bird appears with a thought bubble containing the words “I ain't no chicken” above his head. Argue intended the work to reference historical art and the current state of the painting medium on several levels. Here the artist references Belgian surrealist paint
er Rene Magritte's “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) work. Argue said he is amazed at how people continue to think of a painting in terms of the object depicted and not as literally a painting.
The work is also a commentary on the current state of painting in an art-world context.
“ Painting is seen as being about tradition and lacking a certain bravery. If you were really out there and on the edge, you would be doing performance or something more modern,” Argue said. “This painting is saying, ‘I am not a chicken.' I am experimenting. I am doing something brave.”
This series is not Argue's first attempt at painting chickens to explore concepts. In 1993, after two years of working every day, the artist completed a 12-by-18–foot canvas depicting a chicken coop filled with caged chickens. That painting was part of a series exploring infinity on a limited, two-dimensional surface.
“ The idea was to create an infinite number of individuals, which, of course, is impossible,” Argue said. “I didn't do any more of those chickens for quite a while, and it occurred to me that it might be fun to make an individual that isn't dealing with the infinite community.”
For the current series, the artist borrowed one of the individual chickens from the infinity painting, tracing the face directly off the artwork.
Despite the thought behind the paintings, Argue's portraits are most successful on a visceral level, thanks to chicken's cultural connotations and the individual character's strikingly repulsive appearance.
ON EXHIBIT
“Doug Argue” continues at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, 2004 Baltimore Ave., through May 14. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and by appointment. Call (816) 221-2626 for information.