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Unlike the Condo-esque pastiche of the orange and green portrait’s 3rd-generation faux-primitivism, the other painting in the show, Meert’s flesh and blue portrait grapples with a whole other cultural primitivism of a blue-eyed westerner: the elementary portrait painted in unlearned directness of first attempts to render. That these unlearned portraits reveals, like a repressed artifact floating to the surface of the pool: a western collective-unconscious ideal of person. Like the Vitruvian man fit into rational containers, everyone’s shitty first portraits draw a sort of hidden standard, a boyhood's normative primitivism revealing unconscious ideals.
