Richard Hawkins’s solo exhibition—his eighth at Greene Naftali—follows need the place it leads, in twin pursuit of artwork historic fandom and the lure of the movie star crush. The brand new work on view pay tribute to the work of Pierre Bonnard, as Hawkins filters the late Impressionist’s contact by means of his personal hand and boy-crazy obsessions. The brand new works channel Bonnard’s caressing eye and the reckless hedonism of his shade; the encrusted dazzle of the painted floor that makes rapture its personal reward. Hawkins takes Bonnard interiors and landscapes as prompts to loosen these genres from their genteel moorings, studding his lush, dappled gardens with floating faces of fairly younger males.
“Pleasure—undiluted essence of delight—is a suspect commodity in fashionable artwork,” John Ashbery wrote of Bonnard’s bruised popularity, for coming too late and being too ornamental. Bonnard made his vibratory footage effectively into the Nineteen Forties, and was faulted for embracing mere decoration towards the yardstick of Cubism’s rigor or abstraction’s reserve. Hawkins, for his half, slyly perverts what was latent in his sources: ripe produce splayed on Bonnard’s tabletops are rechristened Fruits; an all-male boating social gathering from 1924 turns into the backdrop for All Palms on D*ck. That maritime scene is overlaid with enlarged heads pulled from Hawkins’s private pantheon: Mike Faist hovers over the sail like an aegis, his bared nipples coloured with an ardent realism, resting atop a area of white dabs laid on with a palette knife, like a Ryman.
Hawkins refers to such passages in his work as “captivation traps”—bits of heightened element amidst the laxer brushwork that snare the viewer’s consideration. All through, he attracts power from the distortions and oddities baked into the Bonnard originals: the skewed sightlines that intensify a theater of objects, the figures and edges left unresolved. Every kink pastoral or nonetheless life is a “defective, poetic translation,” as Hawkins places it, taking liberties (swapping hues and shifting views) that really feel sanctioned by Bonnard’s instance. These new work thus belong to what TJ Clark calls “the Bonnard strand” of modernism, one which will depend on revelry and heedless formal invention as tonic for darkish occasions—an artwork “devoted to the proposition that the one hope, in a corrupt and invasive tradition, is to place one’s belief within the realm of the senses, and expose oneself—naively, virtually idiotically—to the play of sunshine.”
at Greene Naftali, New York
till June 21, 2025
