Rex Ray: New Work

For this related pair of stunning exhibitions, Rex Ray has sent in the clowns. But they are not those happy whacky clowns celebrated in Steven Sondheim’s old-timey anthem, oh no.¹ Rather, they are of the scary, creepy ilk that have been circulating through popular culture for the past several decades, similar to those that went mainstream when Heath Ledger played the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film The Dark Knight. In other words, they are the kind of clowns that exaggerate their own fearfulness insofar as those people who are terrified of clowns are concerned, and that’s what makes them fun in the case of Ray’s clown paintings.

The paintings make up only a portion of Ray’s exhibition at Gallery 16, which also includes abstract collage paintings and digital prints that are more in keeping with the colorful and complex floral abstractions for which he is well known. The clown works are a surprising deviation from those works and posit a kind of inversion of the psychological phenomena termed coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. The twelve clown works at Gallery 16 and twenty-one at Four Barrel Coffee are composed as portraits running from small to medium scale. They are, in fact, complex multi-generational works featuring digital manipulations of photographs of the artist’s collection of glass clowns that were output onto canvas and subsequently treated with layers of silkscreen and diluted acrylic paint. Garishly bright colors make it hard for the viewer to see where one process begins and another ends, and this squares with the reason why some people find clowns so terrifying—their makeup both confuses and exaggerates the distinction between true face and fake face, flipping the subconscious panic switch. The analogy that can be drawn between the atavistic fear of clowns and the art world’s antiquated phobia for digitally produced images is quite amusing.

Nutzo, A3 #1; 2011; oil and pigment print on canvas with silkscreen overprinting. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 16, San Francisco.

This is not the kind of work to be appreciated by those sentimentalists who lack the courage to face their inner bozos. One can easily imagine the hard working staff of Four Barrel Coffee taking secret delight in the way that the paintings resemble some of their regular customers. So, in this case, site specificity carries with it a most amusing double-edged sword, or balloon animal, as the case may be.

Rex Ray is on view at Gallery 16, in San Francisco, through October 29, 2011, and at Four Barrel Coffee, in San Francisco, through December 1, 2011.

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NOTES:

1. Send in the Clowns is a song from Steven Sondheim’s 1973 musical titled A Little Night Music, which is an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 film titled Smiles of a Summer Night. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_in_the_Clowns