New YorkReview
Walton Ford: Primal Instincts and Pop Culture
Written by Andrew Katz Katz
The exhibition's title hints at one subject: King Kong, the original misunderstood monster, a silver-screen antihero. Ford paints the mighty Kong to scale, meaning a series of three works easily his most monumental yet, measuring 9-by-12 feet per sheet. That is huge…but they only encapsulate Kong's great visage, filling each frame in varying stages of grief and fright, from teary-eyed dismay (I don't like to look at him, Jack) to nostril-dilated, teeth-baring rage (It makes me think of that awful day) to wounded defeat, his lips bloodied, translucent tears and snot running down his face (On the island). Stand up close and effortlessly lose yourself in fields of undulating fur. Note the contrast of Kong's wide, wan tongue against leathery, textured skin, like tractor-tire treads, and those bottomless eyes, conveying as much humanlike emotion as his super-sized expressions. Ford drew the separate works' titles from a quote by Fay Wray on the original '33 King Kong, reminding us her own feelings of a day she wishes she could forget, one that Kong loved so much. The trilogy covers the front gallery's three walls for an almost totally immersive experience, within Kong's grief as the unloved and unlovable.
Ford draws from a passage in Audubon's memoirs for a second suite of watercolor drawings in the second gallery, depicting the naturalist's childhood parrot's death at the hands of an adult monkey. As Audubon never mentioned the primate's specific species in his memoirs, Ford depicts it as mutable throughout six panels, "walking deliberately and uprightly toward the poor bird" according to Audubon. Ford synthesizes an unseen human element here, with the mischievous monkey leering over the parrot like a child play-acting (The Man of the Woods) or snatching it from a nest (His Supremacy), foregrounded by psychedelically bright blooms. Ford adds an additional, perverse elaboration within the fourth panel, du Pain au Lait pour le Perroquet Mignonne, as the monkey grasps at both the entrapped bird and his own erect manhood in a mix of frenzy and sexual delight. This leads to the parrot's brutal decapitation as the monkey ejaculates and is summarily chained to a rock at the series' denouement. The vividly colorful parrot, the monkeys' variably textured coats, even the washed-out daytime sky's gradual dip into concluding stormy darkness (…Forever Afterward Chained) receive Ford's masterful, realistic treatment. His expert injection of Kong-sized pop imagery and his continued prowess at adapting and re-imaging Audubon's world means we'll probably never see "just" bird watercolors in Ford's future body of work.
--- Walton Ford was born in Larchmont, NY and lives and works in Great Barrington, MA. His work is included in a number of collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A survey of his work was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in 2006 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida in 2007. Ford's midcareer retrospective debuted at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Fur Gegenwart in Berlin last year and traveled to the Albertina in Vienna and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. I don't like to look at him, Jack. It makes me think of that awful day on the island is his eighth solo exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, on view through December 23. Brian Fee is an art punk currently based in Austin, TX. His culture blog Fee's List covers his three loves (art, film and live music) occurring in his other three loves (the Lone Star State, the Big Apple, and Tokyo).
A
Written by
Andrew Katz Katz
More stories
View all
THE MAGAZINE
Explore our magazine to discover exceptional artists
Call for Artists
Submit your work for consideration
New American Paintings is a juried exhibition-in-print and digital, presenting the work of 40 emerging artists in each issue.
Your gateway to new art
Discover tomorrow's art stars, today
PRINT + EARLY ACCESS DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION
$179/YEAR
DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION
$99/YEAR OR $10/MONTH
Each issue of New American Paintings features forty artists selected through our juried competitions—presented in a beautifully curated, full-color publication. Subscribers receive six issues per year, plus exclusive online access to current and past editions. Are you a collector? Consider our premium subscription and receive our museum-quality printed publication + access to each new digital issue two weeks before its general release.