Allison Katz: Artery, Camden Art Centre, Arkwright Road, London, through March 13, 2022
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We are the picture people. I kept hearing the phrase in my head, repeating as I walked through Allison Katz’s show at Camden Art Centre, taking in her big, bright canvases, with their wild proliferation of images that repeat and echo and morph, surprise and enthral across twenty-four paintings, most of them made in the last eighteen months. Cabbages, cocks (the barnyard variety), mouths, self-portraits, eggs, openings, spaces within spaces, images within images, exhibitions within exhibitions—things overlaid, overlapping, contained, framed, staged. Katz’s subjects are vivid and energetic, unruly yet precise, as is her style and technique—the texture and tenor of which shifts subtly in each painting, attuned to whatever is at hand.
We are the picture people, the earworm persisted. It was only on the train home, brain still buzzing with Katz’s colors, punning titles (The Cockfather!), implied associations, rhyming shapes and forms, that I realized where the statement was from. In Lynne Tillman’s Men and Apparitions, her narrator—an academic ethnographer named Zeke—collects photos of families and the familial, including pets, blurred figures, empty interiors, sometimes snapped accidentally: the weird, hovering familiars of daily life that linger and accumulate, and from which we piece together versions of ourselves, our pasts and presents. “I name us Picture People,” he says, “because most special and obvious about the species is, our kind lives on and for pictures, lives as and for images, our species takes pictures, makes pix, thinks in pix. It exists if it’s a picture and can be pictured. Surface is depth, when nothing is superficial.” Katz’s métier is painting, not photography, but she too is a collector of images, an assembler of very specific scenes and tableaux: a maker of pix gathered from the materials and experiences of the everyday, though twisted, off-kilter, made strange and fantastic and perplexing, as if to say—avowedly, plainly, amorously—no, life just does not add up, and what of it? And as such, what can a canvas hold? Can a work of art be at once contradictory and coherent?
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