David Salle's "Going on Her Nerve"

Rose Wylie, I Like To Be (2020)

I love ekphrasis – the written description of a work of art. There are two wonderful examples of it in David Salle’s recent “Going on Her Nerve” (The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2022), a review of the exhibition “Rose Wylie: Which One” (David Zwirner, April 28 – June 12, 2021):

1. One painting in particular will exemplify what I mean. At more than ten feet long, I Like To Be (2020) shows two female figures facedown in water. The one near the top edge is engaged in some sort of breaststroke, limbs bent like the legs of a crab, the bottom of her bathing suit poufing out like a baby’s diaper, her thick black lines of coiled hair semi-floating in the green, foamy water. Her body, outlined in viscous strokes of carmine-red oil paint, could be a bathing-suit-wearing crustacean: there she floats, oblivious to our gaze. The lower bather, also face-down, is cropped in half by the canvas’s bottom edge, and her body is fantastically elongated, stretching across the painting’s entire width, her mass of black hair surging improbably forward, while her right arm, disproportionately shrunken, is cut off at the point at which it plunges into the water. It’s the image we have in the mind’s eye as we push away from the wall of the pool, arms outstretched before us as we glide through the water—the sensation of the streamlined body getting longer. Two swimmers facedown in a wide green sea, one half crab and the other mostly squid, poised amid the horizontal brushstrokes of sea-foam green, with I LIKE TO BE in chunky black letters giving voice to the emotion. It’s a thrilling picture; I’m tempted to have the words tattooed on my biceps.

2. The Zwirner show contained one of the weirdest paintings I’ve seen in years: Illuminated Manuscript, Adam and Eve (2020). A medium-sized vertical canvas is bisected by an ocher-colored tree flanked by a female figure on the left and a male figure on the right. This is Adam and Eve as you’ve never seen them before: Eve is roughly the shape of a carrot, with a face like Popeye’s and what looks like a shower cap on her shrunken head. A pair of breasts flaccidly descend to meet two shoulder-less Gumby arms. Adam has broad shoulders but the same rubbery arms, one of which ends in an upturned hand that resembles an elephant’s trunk. Both figures are painted in the same raw sienna as the tree, with a little darker ocher here and there, and all are outlined in a dark red. Where the genitals—or fig leaves, in the medieval renditions—would be, Wylie has supplied broad swaths of pale yellow paint applied in vigorously clumsy strokes, as if she’s scrubbing a floor, and the same yellow paint wraps itself diagonally around the tree, becoming a de facto yellow serpent.

That “Two swimmers facedown in a wide green sea, one half crab and the other mostly squid, poised amid the horizontal brushstrokes of sea-foam green, with I LIKE TO BE in chunky black letters giving voice to the emotion” is inspired! The entire piece is inspired – one of the best art reviews of the year!