Project Painting

One reason there's so much more painting around these days is because there's so much more money around. In the latter stages of a strong economy (like the still-galloping American one), extra cultural outlets spring up like mushrooms: new magazines, new restaurants, new art galleries and new paintings - the ultimate in speculative investments, a perfect sop for truly disposable income. On the production side, all those art-school lectures and articles about the evils of the marketplace were fine when there was no market for art; but now that artists are beginning to be treated like minor rock stars again, theory's vaunted goal of exterminating the object seems - once again - a bit hasty.

This is all a prelude to discussing 'Project Painting,' a two-gallery group show with the narrowly focused, yet wide-open mandate of taking stock of the current state of non-abstract easel painting. It's necessary because the current economic climate is in part responsible for a distinctly relaxed attitude in these paintings - along with the painters' relief that their vocation is no longer considered an evil or outré habit, and their more long-standing immunity (leftover from when painting was a bad habit) from Rabbinical scrutiny for signs of unholy enthusiasms or flighty thinking.

In the 'Project Painting' catalogue, the show's curators - art dealers all - predictably note this easeful air as a pleasant mystery, showing up in the work of old hands like Chuck Close and Carroll Dunham, as well as new faces like Laura Owens and Nicola Tyson. While there are no great revelations in the show, there are some quirky - some would say gutsy - curatorial touches: like hanging John Currin's unflattering fantasy portraits of women next to Lisa Yuskavage's cartoonishly similar ones, and putting Close's digitised portrait of painter Alex Katz next to Matthew Antezzo's own pixellated picture of computer-nerd/art-philanthropist Peter Norton.

The curatorial genius ends there, however, and tails off into a general 'look' that binds the paintings (and which may account for the exclusion of interesting artists like Elizabeth Peyton and Luc Tuymans): a kind of yellowishness - the colour of old linen, say, or papyrus - and a spare yet intellectually busy surface. The latter is epitomised by Matthew Ritchie's highbrow action cartoons (which follow a script only the artist has the mental energy to keep track of), rendered not in the vibrant reds and blues of standard pulp, but avocado greens and opaque ochres - the hues of suburban refrigerators c.1974. Lari Pittman's compendiums of cultural signs and symbols (almost always exuberant, in times good or bad) arguably begat this trend, albeit without the bookish hype. Even so, his paintings are lately a little less wound up, and less obviously topical. Stylised doll heads have replaced the lachrymose schlongs and vomiting Victorian silhouettes of the past; and while still vibrating with the energy that is his trademark - razor-cut doodads still bouncing back and forth across jubilantly kaleidoscopic surfaces - Pittman's two small, untitled paintings here seem less about constructing a queer universe than with finally living in it.

There are also some good works by Ellen Gallagher, Shahzia Sikander and the late Peter Cain - young artists whose paintings arose in the tumultuous critical climate that coincidentally preceded the current art-market renaissance, in which painting was left to its own devices after the perceived excesses of the 80s. By picking up painting when no one wanted to touch it, these artists were allowed an immense amount of freedom; so they made painting into something that interested them, importing bits and pieces of whatever was around.

What they bring to their paintings is a smorgasbord of styles, issues, and attitudes: Cain's oversized, close-up portrait of a male friend on the beach has a 60s aura, combining the candified colours and super-smooth brushstrokes of Tom Wesselman with the vertiginous landscape-bordering-on-abstraction of Richard Diebenkorn. Gallagher's one painting in the show, called Afro Puff (1996) seems like a companion piece to one of Gary Simmons' chalkboard drawings: she uses tiny versions of his same stereotyped cartoon lips as a pictorial unit, building them up on a substrate of yellowed notebook paper to form cottony clouds of hair. Sikander, born in Pakistan, makes small, Eastern-influenced paintings with enigmatic yet seething titles, like Not on My Head, Maybe It's in Your Mind (1997), a mixed-media work of acrylic, tea wash, and watercolour, depicting a many-armed female deity outfitted in an Islamic veil and wielding sharpened instruments of death.

In the end, Sue Williams may best exemplify the nascent promise of 'Project Painting.' Williams once made ferociously polemical feminist art, perhaps the least subtle and most honest of its kind - so much so that it often made more intellectualised and theoretical stuff just look cowardly, angling for a sale to one staid institution or another. Williams' one new painting here is a large expanse of glossy white canvas covered in excitable, precisely unintelligible, uncannily eye-pleasing doodles, with a vaguely uterine cast. It could go either way: it might be loaded with sexual politics, or it could be a Twombly-esque optical bonbon. Or maybe it's both: a painting with a political component that also entertains the eye. Pittman discovered the secret to such sneaky, polymorphously pleasurable artworks almost a decade ago; but now talents new and old are joining the party, making serious paintings with the potential to engage viewers from different constituencies. Enjoy it while you can.