VAPID CURIOSITY
Elizabeth Fox's substantial 'Desire in America' exhibit embraces a nation's obsession with style over substance
Friday, May 18, 2007
By Doug MacCash
Art critic
I'm jealous of Paris Hilton. In many ways, she's the
American dream come true: Fabulously rich, impeccably
beautiful, glowingly famous, and, above all, wrapped in the
comfort of utter obviousness. Just watch, even her impending
trip to the hoosgow at the hands of an intolerant judge
won't tarnish Hilton's star one iota.
I couldn't help but think of Hilton as I perused Elizabeth
Fox's outstanding exhibit "Desire in America," at d.o.c.s.
gallery last week. The women who dominate most of her
marvelous paintings are amazingly Hilton-like, complete with
high cheekbones, mile-long legs, translucent garments,
abundant jewels and stiletto heels. Like Hilton, they stare
blithely into the distance as they wander through polished,
pastel-colored worlds, populated by staggeringly handsome,
mindlessly lustful men.
Even Fox's technique is suggestive of Hilton. Her cartoonish
paintings are as slick and shiny as freshly polished
toenails. They're so minutely detailed, they could have been
brushed with a single faux eyelash. And they are, in their
way, as vacant and vapid as the look on poor Hilton's face.
I mean that in a good way.
Florida-born Fox, 37, is the master of vacancy. Unlike her
hero and friend Douglas Bourgeois who coats every painting
with a Persian rug skein of obsessive detail, Fox revels in
spaces as empty as a drained swimming pool. Notice the sea
of cement around the long-legged vixen in the painting
titled "Pink Fedora," the blue vacuum around the svelte
sales clerk in "Jewelry Store" and the inky eternity
surrounding the virtually nude triplets in "The Three
Graces." Those areas of nothingness are terribly important.
They isolate Fox's subjects. They hold the world around them
at arm's length. They place them under the microscope, so to
speak.
My favorite painting is "Lamplight Forest," Fox's take on
the Little Red Riding Hood story, played out by a seductive
Hilton clone and a menacing, though not terribly robust,
wolfman. Notice that Fox has placed the characters at the
edges of the scene. The heart of the painting is a pictorial
void as numbing as a plastic surgeon's stash of Novocain.
Cynics might say that empty-heartedness is the essential
metaphor in all of "Desire in America."
Unexpectedly, Fox is not at all cynical about her
Hiltonesque subjects. She is their champion. She said they
represent aspects of her personality and her desires. She
freely admits, to make it into her art, "everyone has to
look kind of rich and beautiful." She's not the least
resentful of the lifestyles of the rich and famous she
depicts, even though, years ago, she struggled to make ends
meet, selling paintings to tourists on Royal Street, "eating
potato salad and wearing rags."
"I don't look down on any of these people," she said. "I'm
not trying to be judgmental. I'm not saying I'm better than
any of these characters. I like to shop, I like to read
magazines, I'm right in there with them."
Maybe so, but to my eye, Fox has stirred up a subtly
subversive, possibly subconscious subcurrent in her
paintings that threatens to drag her beautiful people under.
It may be what Fox means when she says her paintings always
contain "a little nervousness."
The angry little dog, the furtive man in the corner, the
voyeur, the dripping ice cream cone, the disturbingly
pubescent lemons, the over-injected lips, the hypnotic stare
of the jewelry sales girl, the whistling construction
workers, the punch-drunk glaze of the boxer, the glimpse of
the supplicant manservant's backside, the tiny portions of
food and the agitated expression of the woman eating it:
Everywhere you look Fox has provided something to interrupt
the self-absorption of her subjects. Deliberately or not,
everywhere you look there's something to make them a little
nervous.
As nervous, perhaps, as Miss Hilton will be when the prison
door clinks shut behind her.
_________________________
"DESIRE
IN AMERICA" BY ELIZABETH FOX
What: Precise cartoon-like paintings depicting the rich and
beautiful.
Where: d.o.c.s. gallery, 709 Camp St., (504) 524-3936.
When: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5, through May.
Prices: From $450 to $4,500
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