Top: Exhibition view of Joyce Pensato's This Must Be The Place at Parker's Box; Bottom: Joyce Pensato, Bunny, enamel on linen, 62" x 50". .

This Must Be The Place
Joyce Pensato



Parker's Box, Williamsburg, New York
October 20 - November 20, 2006

reviewed by
James Rosenthal

The cartoon image has been a muse for artists for as long as it has existed and one could argue that drawing began as a cartoon-type thing in ancient history. More recently the relationship between animated characters and painting has become more fluid trading back and forth. Stuart Davis and Charles Demuth jazzed up their paintings that way by dropping in images of signs cribbed from the side of the highway and you could feel the influence of celluloid’s Crazy Kat on this process. But since pop art blew the whistle on Abstract Expressionism – saying, lighten up guys – in the late 50’s, it has not only been a fixture gaining in importance, it sets up a tension between the high and low elements in the art of painting. I mean by taking in the aesthetics and concepts involved, gauging history and weighing it up next to the craft of serious paintership which comes and goes. Basquiat has to be the best example of that particular mix; less classical reference and more urban subculture.

Today, the cartoon influence has become even more rampant and complicated technologically with the influx of sophisticated 3D imaging, video games, the graphic novel, and Japanese Manga. Soon 3D film characters will replace live actors completely, though luckily they can still make a buck doing the voice-overs. It is strange that in the matrix of spectacle that is our world, the humble newspaper comic still engages so. Joyce Pensato obviously lives and breathes in this world and her work exemplifies the fact emitting a strong presence. Her comics perform in a more old fashioned sense – that is a good thing – and make a hybrid that stand taller than the usual stuff. Although I can make Gustonian allusions and mention Rothenberg, Pensato brings her own intensity to the fore. She has compressed a pop sensibility into a formalist mode with great singularity and she rises to meet that inevitable expressionist challenge with gusto. She works hard in the studio, no doubt, but this work enlivens an old nutshell with new life that imbues images with both the immediacy of graffiti and the gravity of something more sinister and possibly from the realm of high art.

If one imagines a dated aura in these works, it can only be in the sense that Pensato is a mature painter doing what she does best and has been doing for years. Her drawn Homer Simpson is a massive goggle-eyed Roman Emperor that you can stand in front of and praise for hours. He stares out over his court of other flat, yet painterly, creatures that come from earlier in the last century and have passed into antiquity. Disney’s main duck and mouse, Donald and Mickey, still survive being kept on corporate life-support while Pensato gives them a further nine lives. The only things left out from the original mix is the surreal landscape with Ignatz hurling the brick or Betty Boop walking along in a drug-like vision escorted by a stoner-jazz soundtrack. Here though, as he often presides in our televisual viewing, Homer may be the one having the visions. He looks for a metaphor or continuum, glimpsing back to the twenties through the expressionistic 50’s trope, and he can’t keep from bouncing forward again. D’oh! Pensato’s feat is to pack these works with both a charge of real gestural and dripping enamel but also a soul and an actuality in black and white. This cannot be easy to achieve. Where a lot of the new cartoonesque work is superficial and intensely generational, i.e. overly illustrational, Pensato cuts through it all and gives both painting and the comics their due.

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© 2006 James Rosenthal and InLiquid.com; image copyright © Joyce Pensato courtesy Parker's Box