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| SUGAR DADDY: JERRY KEARNS PAINTINGS 1992-2004 |
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Paintings, 1992–2004." On view are three divergent bodies of work from a
prolific span in the career of one of America’s most assiduously political
painters, culminating in his spectacular display of anti-war passion.
Jerry Kearns was the most rock and roll aggressive painter to come out of
the Vietnam era. For 25 years, his works were politically charged and
graphically explosive. “Sugar Daddy” begins with 5 high-voltage paintings
from Kearns’ 1992 “American Portrait” series. The banalities of American
Pop are thrust into dramatic confrontation with hallowed images from the
nation’s early beginnings. This is the Jerry that was.
Kearns moral outrage had driven him to make powerful images of social
injustice. But, by the mid-90s, the identity politics movement he had
helped to engender was suspicious: This longtime standard-bearer
of the –isms was an “older white male.”
In response, Jerry Kearns turned inward. And what a change: “Kearns’
style is ‘delicate,’ very soft painting, with many silences,” noted Robert
Mahoney in 1999, “[He] captures that quiet afternoon mood of midlife when
all the sturm and drang of youth is gone, replaced by mature brooding
upon missed opportunities.”
Today, Kearns continues to nurture this nuanced sensibility in his
“Dreams” series. The canvases are complex, multiple-figure portraits of
synthetic identities, fluidly hybridized from the advertising pages of fashion
magazines. His characters seem displaced and disfigured in a timeless
Tiffany zone; they are bewildered and apprehensive. Moral certitude is
nowhere to be found.
In a third, altogether new body of work, Kearns reasserts his assaultive
nature. “Collisions” swerves full-circle back into the hellfire of contemporary
terror. Pumped-up, baby-head warriors are crucified in the flames of
bombs over Baghdad. Buff, fashion-plate cyborgs beam with giddy delight
at the raw power of their techno-sexuality.
