Inside out: Wayne’s Embedded Paintings

New York artist Leslie Wayne’s clever intra-sheetrock works — paintings that seem to erupt from the gallery wall like wounds spewing gobs of paint — are often more tantalizing as an idea than as the objects assembled at Midtown’s Solomon Projects. Subverting the integrity of the gallery’s pristine white cube and blurring the line between painting and installation, the majority of Wayne’s works in Under My Skin appear to short circuit the usual commercial exchange of cash for art.Literally embedded in the gallery walls, Wayne’s visceral works appear to be scooped or slashed out of the white sheetrock and thus difficult to sell as artwork commodities. In fact, the paintings are seamlessly dry-walled into place but can be taken out of their gallery prison as wooden forms, which are then re-installed into the buyer’s own wall at home.
The work itself has an edgy, violent feel that continually evokes assaults on the body. Like the smooth organ of skin that encases all manner of blood and gore, Wayne’s paint eruptions challenge the comparably smooth, unassailable backdrop of the gallery space. The work evokes flesh and blood, but its highly artificial, garish color scheme seems more related to process and the degrees of artifice and manipulation involved in not only painting but in gallery display strategies. With their chunky, globbed, sweeping cascades of paint, Wayne’s works foreground the texture of her medium. Not merely paintings, these works are first and foremost about paint as a malleable, molded substance closer to clay or unformed bronze.
Wayne’s work has a horror-movie appeal on strictly formal terms, but unfortunately the look and the content of the work never seem to coalesce in a satisfying way. Wayne’s disruption of the gallery space is challenging and savvy, but beyond the activity involved in such a process, the work often feels surprisingly static and limited — a formal experiment at a dead end. The works are often physically unappealing — their color scheme of detergent blues, burnt oranges and shimmering golds make the patent artificiality of their form hard to match up with the “visceral” world of blood, flesh and bodies. If Wayne’s goal is to evoke the visceral, that objective partly fails in the patently fake, “painterly” colors of her canvases, whose pigments are more about the sensationalism of paint than about deeper or metaphorical ideas of the body. And her fake, pharmaceutical, auto-body color palette seems antithetical to her themes of viscera, body, blood and injury.
Wayne is clearly challenging the essential barriers of life that become so disturbing when they are ruptured: between inside and outside, appearance and reality. Her trio of paintings mounted on wooden boxes mimic the look of a vaginal gash (“Breaking and Entering: The Mouth that Roared II”), a series of claw marks executed in blood-red slashes on gold canvas (“Breaking and Entering: Happy Gold”) and bullet holes dripping a Crayola spectrum of color (“Breaking and Entering: Shooting Gallery”). While these works on wood seem more literally about inside and out and more explicitly corporeal, they lack the critical edge of Wayne’s “embedded” paintings.
Challenging the flat, confined two-dimensional space of the painting, work like Wayne’s is, in critic Peter Plagens’ words, about “how much can you fold, spindle and mutilate the convention of a flat, rectangular canvas and still come up with a painting?” Wayne has certainly retained the features of painting in Under My Skin. But for those looking for a happy marriage of form and content, Wayne’s theoretical tampering with the parameters of painting may finally disappoint.
Under My Skin: Wall Installations and Paintings runs through Nov. 25 at Solomon Projects, 1037 Monroe Drive. Wed.-Sat. 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Mon.-Tues. by appointment. 404-875-7100.