New paintings by Scott Fishpaw are on view at the Mission Media Space Gallery until Saturday, March 6. The show is a well-rounded one, featuring 22 ambitious oil-on-wood works. Fishpaw should be applauded for the goals he sets for himself artistically; unfortunately, his art fails to stand up under its own weight. His vibrant but predictable palette portrays complex scenes, well-rendered but largely unconvincing.
Fishpaw's chosen medium of oil on wood dates back to Renaissance altarpieces of the 16th century, but here the wood does more than align the artist innocuously with the Christian artistic tradition: The grain of the wood, as well as subliminal etchings in it, are rather knavishly utilized to reinforce the anemic and unsatisfying linearity pervading the works. That is, the beleaguered lines are propped up by the wood's inherent verticality and poise, going with the grain and too often relying on it. On account of this, the art suffers: The characters are floaty and languishing, the backgrounds simplistic.
At the same time, however, there is much to praise in these paintings. Sexual and social politics endure scrutiny, as in for example Conundrum Yoke, in which a man in a tuxedo disdainfully regards a smiling mask with a halo that's tied around his neck. A beautiful woman behind him to the left pulls back a curtain to reveal paintings on the walls, while another gorgeous woman to the right ascends a staircase.
In my opinion, this piece is a comment on monogamy: The man is yoked to a mask, which would make its wearer appear happy, with the assumption being that he must choose one woman, the other departing. Masks, smiling or frowning, as well as jester caps and jesters themselves, are several key recurring images in Fishpaw's paintings, probing theories of social and personal identity.
Nor are religious themes avoided. One of the better works in the show, "Emollient Seed", depicts people regarding a green fish which has been nailed to a platter. The fish is a well-known stand-in for the figure of Christ, and the stake driven through it is strongly evocative of the crucifixion.
What's interesting about this painting is that the observers are looking at the fish as though it's art, some kind of weird sculpture. Could Fishpaw be commenting on the artistic value of traditional religious scenes, which, as I noted, were often painted with oil on wood? The characters in this painting are enraptured by the fish -- they know what the artist is trying to tell us -- but personally, I was left guessing.
Unfortunate incongruities mark several of the paintings, one of them as simple as spelling. When an artist makes the decision to incorporate words into his art, he'd better know exactly what he's saying. A tacked-up note on the wall in "Autumn Seeps" reads in big capital letters "every day is a Christ/ each day is a Christ/ and existance/ grips for time."
Excluding, for a moment, conjectures on what this could possibly mean, the first thing worth mentioning is that, in America at least, "existence" is spelled with an E. It becomes difficult for a viewer to take a painting seriously in the presence of such a glaring, basic error. I tried at first to give the painter the benefit of the doubt: Perhaps this work was some grand treatise, damning the arbitrary and binding conventions of a racist, imperialist, sexist language developed to propagate the beliefs of those most evil old dead white men. Nothing doing -- just plain old inescapable bad spelling.
Fishpaw should take a lesson from one of my favorite living artists, Jenny Holzer, whose so-called Truisms and other one-liners (online at http://mfx.dasburo.com/art/truisms.html) are brilliant and have been displayed in public places such as stadium billboards or projected onto building facades.
Fishpaw's paintings are intriguing, but they ask more questions than they answer fully, and the work was a little bit sloppy overall. Nevertheless, if you're in Mt. Vernon, I'd recommend checking them out.
