Henry Taylor, and the ‘feeling of bluntness’.
The Long Jump – by Carol Lewis, 2010
About:
The large, bold, unabashedly painterly paintings of Henry Taylor find a fitting stage at Blum & Poe. Spaciously hung in high-ceiling rooms, interspersed with a handful of found object sculptures, the paintings have a potent presence, with a rich and distinctly human character that one rarely sees now as a mainstay in painting.
Untitled, 2011.
The work hews close to a strain of African American painting tracing back to Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, one that drew simultaneously from folk art and modernism in its depictions of black life in America. (Kerry James Marshall, a contemporary of Taylor’s and not dissimilar in style, comes to mind as a like heir.)
The connection is especially palpable in this case, given the show’s dramatic centerpiece: five roughly 10-by-6-foot paintings based on WPA photographs of black farm workers, surrounding a plot of 6-inch deep soil furrowed to resemble a freshly plowed field. At the center of the plot, which reaches nearly to the edges of the room, is a long dining room table and chairs, with a crystal chandelier hanging overhead.
It’s Like a Jungle, 2011.
The conceptual association is clear enough, perhaps — luxury rides on the back of an exploited labor class — but no less stirring for being so pointed. Formally these paintings are the tightest in the show, with a sense of gravity, a reverence even, that helps to knit more tightly what can feel loose and off-kilter in the other works. (review in LATimes on exhibition Blum & Poe LA)
Courtesy: Blum & Poe, Los angeles.
The We Hours, 2012.
Resting, 2011.
Jack Move – Proved It, 2011.
Mr. Taylor (1958) conflates abstraction and realism in his work, giving it the feeling of bluntness (and mischief) found in someone like Alex Katz, but the way he hunts down his subjects transforms his practice into a process of earnest documentation. A number of superficial factors, however, have branded him an “outsider artist”—he’s black, he grew up poor, he paints prostitutes and drug users, he is a seriously prolific curser, he had a 10-year stint working as a psychiatric nurse at a California state hospital, he didn’t finish art school until he was in his 30s, and he didn’t get his work shown in a gallery until a decade after that. Mr. Taylor and the people close to him admonish the label. (“Motherfuck,” he said when I mentioned “outsider.” “I say to hell with all that shit. Some Rauschenberg shit can look like outsider shit and vice versa. Fuck yeah, man.”) But he’s also an artist in demand. In addition to the show at PS1, which runs through the beginning of April, L.A.’s Blum & Poe gallery will be showing his work at the Art Show, the prestigious Upper East Side fair put on annually by the Art Dealers Association of America in early March. That month, Untitled will do a solo show in its space on the Lower East Side. If he was an outsider before, he now has to navigate his way through the mainstream. (From Observer, January 2012)