Pretty in plastic

Christian Vincent eviscerates celebrity culture



With their giraffe necks, Stepford-glazed expressions and toothy smiles, the perky gals in Christian Vincent’s painting “Beauty Queens” have the vaguely deformed, ludicrously cute appearance of art-world sensation John Currin’s painted ladies.

Vincent’s 87-by-97-inch painting is the captivating focal point in the solo show Flavor of the Month devoted to the California artist at Fay Gold Gallery.

Isolated in 24 color-mad cameos, the bodacious babes’ archetypal beauty ranges from Pat Nixon helmet hair to a ’50s Ole Miss-style homecoming queen wearing a blond flip and a hint of sadism in her arched brow. Flash forward a decade or so to the Britt Ekland look-alike, with her curtain of stick-straight blond bangs and Malibu suntan. From blatantly artificial to debatably “natural,” the styles and standards of beauty may undergo modification, but the song remains the same. Smiles do not originate in pleasure or amusement, but are instead the robotic aim-to-please rictus of women succumbing to a social demand for perpetual feminine cheerfulness.

“Beauty Queens” is just one in Vincent’s occasionally snide but beautifully rendered eviscerations of a celebrity culture’s desire to reduce women to photo-ready poses.

On the wall facing “Beauty Queens” is a quartet of adolescent girls that underscores this dumb, slightly sinister process of banality.

Like womanhood’s backup singers, the young girls look to be tentatively working toward the kind of self-packaging and self-promotion practiced by those gleeful pageant fillies. Against an array of creamy, delicate pastels — lilacs, bubble gum pinks and wintergreens — these young girls range from not quite sexual to more blatantly so. They throw out knowing glances and fragile starry-eyed expressions. With their tank tops proclaiming “Hollywood” and “Lotta Love,” they are already in thrall to the same vacuous culture that produced the queens. But they have a vulnerability that inspires a sense of protectiveness because their masks of beauty and desirability are not quite there.

If only the other works in Vincent’s show had the same emotional kick. “Pink Flash,” “Yellow Flash” and “Blue Flash” — three prettified portraits of dim-bulb Hollywood-styled celebrity — repeat the pastel tones that envelope the teenagers in a smog of perfumed deception. But Vincent’s flash mob has a more grotesque and superficial feel echoed in their stippled surfaces.

The flash series is rounded out by two Norman Rockwell-styled nods to American mythmaking that mimic advertisements. In these paired portraits, a good-looking man and woman cavort ludicrously, playing one-man bands of drums, banjos, cymbals and guitars. “Big Joe” looks like one of the gangly soldiers or farm boys of Rockwell-land crossed with a Beck-style indie rocker. The painting, which has the slightly modified realism of the beauty queens, is a visual knockout. But in the context of his other paintings, “Big Joe” doesn’t say nearly as much.

In “The Talent,” a similarly loosey-goosey woman bows her legs in a chicken strut while she plays a crazed combo of guitar and cymbals located at her ankles and knees. That she’s naked and her mouth forms the perfect rounded “O” of a blow-up sex doll makes for a critique of T&A-obsessed L.A. that seems to cast women as the villains.

Vincent’s work would probably hit its mark better if it didn’t reflect some of the creepier tones of John Currin’s facetious kitsch of big-titted, freakish women. Like Currin, Vincent often passes from social critique into cruel mockery and misogynist caricature.

Vincent does far better when he allows some humanity to slip through his razor wit, as seen in his images of the teenage girls. Those paintings reveal the pathos of girls born into a world where the wrapping of plastic cellophane threatens to suffocate them.

Felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com