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Monday, April 16, 2018

Robert Colescott at Blum & Poe


(link)

Brush work that drip sarcasm, almost wrinkling with disdain, irony and ire. White flesh is like a plastic coating, like a makeup applied. While the relations are never as ambiguous as Kara Walker's later inkblots; and history reconstruction sees Manet'a Olympian servant reimagined as Klimtian lovers or de Kooning's women as made to sell syrup rather than Kehinde Wiley's grandiose revisionism; and the threading of cultural forms a bit more bare than Kerry James Marshall kaleidoscopes, you can see their protostages here in Colescott's struggle to unite them, the contradictory modes, grandiosity, uncertainty, self-deprecation, anger, and pain.