Grant Barnhart – Beg For It

Nothing like confidence. For his exhibition announcement photo, Grant Barnhart coded the theme onto a mug in his Rat Pack impersonation of a cool guy: Beg For It.

In spite of its self-mocking arrogance, his
pose is a comic acknowledgment of reality: He is a young painter
in Seattle at the edge of even the Seattle experience, overlooked as a
matter of course. With this image, he tells not only his nearly nonexistent audience but the wider world that it
will have to work to keep up with him.

Which is true. Those who know him expect attitude, and yet his paintings are all heart.

The old horse whose ragged breath congests in a clotted stream is wrapped in the consolations of color, fall trees behind her
and flowers at her feet. Blooms surge as she recedes. For all her
weight, she’s drifting like a hair or a feather on a cloudy mixture of
memory.

Killing Time With Sleeping Pills, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 36 x 48

Sympathy for the devil: A killing machine leans its hammer head on a pier to die as gulls scream overhead.

Private Thoughts Are Lost, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 18 x 24

Foam and froth and dirty wings are all that’s left of the deep, but the light that shimmers on the beast’s bloated flank is as dainty as a Fragonard slipper.

Stephen Crane:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Thanks to scale shifts, now and then are together again in Goya garb and contemporary: The crowd marinating in its own stupidity gazes at a scene beyond its
understanding.

Mastiff On Trial, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 36 x 48

Sweeney Todd:

 
There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit
      and the vermin of the world inhabit it
And its morals aren’t worth what a pig could spit…

On a lighter note: The image of women stepping into their underwear is an erotic staple, especially in Barnhart’s vein of catching the subject unawares.

Precious Broken Elastic, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 11 x 14 inches

But pearly pink and baby blue shades set up a dainty scene that isn’t there. If the model knows how to put on underwear, it’s not evident from the image. She’s forcing herself into her clothes like a plow furrowing a field.

Sunset, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 40 x 30

Isle of Man, 2009, acrylic/canvas, 60 x 48

Although there are narratives here in an Eric Fischl vein, Barnhart isn’t interested in creating a common thread.  Fischl would never put such a range of paintings together in one show. He hits a theme and explores it. Barnhart’s disregard for connectives approaches Martin Kippenberger’s. Barnhart believes in the vibrational field of a painting, and the idea that vibrations on the same frequency tend to fuse. His do. Beg For It at Ambach & Rice is a force field. (My review of his previous show here.)

Through Jan. 24.