522 West 21st Street
March 5 – April 15
by Lee Klein
The only thing that the wealthy off-the-charts eccentric Venetian habitué Marchesa Luisa Casati is recorded as having said is “I want to be a living work of Art.” Enter Walton Ford, a present day storied visual cataloguer of ecology and Animalia who has now gone gargantuan for an indulgent fantasy extreme depicted in the afterthought of his having related that he wanted to portray “the world’s fastest animal living a fast life with a fast woman.”
That said, holy luminosity Batman, his paintings have taken on a more painterly stance yet still at times being of a natural illustrative disposition. So therein John James Audubon momentarily gets off the gondola ride (except that these works remain as is his métier, watercolors and gouaches) and John Singer Sargent and Yvonne Jacquette get on as historical support influences for Ford’s new attention to heightened color detailing and structural entropy.
Singer Sargent, born to American expatriates in Florence, also loved to paint Venice and one of his Venetian masterpieces is “A Street in Venice” (1880-81) now held in the permanent collection of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts and in a stunning aside, this writer asking the artist if this was indeed the case that his “Desiderio Infinito” painting was painted after the Sargent led to a powerful affirmative fist bump from then artist. Then in the next moments in the holy grail of all unexpected encounters led to an accidental face-to-face with Sir Mick Jagger, is directly correlative to the initial painting in this exhibit in its clockwise turn of works “Desiderio Infinito” (en: eternal wish). Here though Ford’s cheetah’s fur symmetrically flows in patterns approaching the majestic geometry of a peacock’s plumage.
The exhibition reminds this writer of a 2024 exhibition— Cecily Brown’s “The 5 Senses” tour de force at Paula Cooper. Here in Desiderio we also get a discarded duck-head just about to be devoured either by the cheetahs who always wear bejeweled collars and leashes or the smaller feral cats in their shadows (of course one can find such cats today around the Stazione Santa Lucia just before you are about to step into the city or take the vaporetto).
Also deep in their shadows is the Marchesa herself, who once upon a time led the big felines through the endless alleys, passageways, and piazzas of la Serenissima.
So there she stands at the far end of the alleyway/street before the seawater in blood red at first glance looking like the Bride of Frankenstein but then with touches of Arcimboldo and Botticelli’s “La Primavera.”
Meanwhile the brickwork in this picture does not have quite the articulated dissolution and or texture of the Sargent, but this painting does many marvelous things — first and foremost the evocation of the memory of existence and the cataloguing of the passage of time.
