Roger Brown’s recent paintings at the Phyllis Kind Gallery continue in the pacific vein he has mined since making California his chief base of operations a few seasons ago.
The old fractiousness, which for years had been central to the content of Brown’s paintings, seems largely to have vanished, leaving an indolence that for generations has been attributed to the laid-back California lifestyle.
Only once, with a canvas called “California Gawkers: Being the Chief Cause and Primary Source of California Traffic Jams,” does Brown appear to be working himself toward a diatribe, though it goes no farther than the title of a piece that, in itself, proves both toothless and a stylistic throwback.
Of course, the look of Brown’s paintings seldom has reflected his more rabid titles and texts, for the words rather than his hard-edged cartoon forms were the primary conveyors of feeling. The absence of written rant, as is the case with his paintings in the present exhibition, only emphasizes the muteness of his brushwork and decorative imagery.
Now that will be apparent to even the most casual viewer, owing to Brown’s reliance on formulas from earlier stages in his career. Every window, whether of house or car, has the silhouette of a figure. Men express wonder by pointing; women, by throwing up their hands. Clouds are quilted, pillowlike. Each landscape has the same serrated bushes and yellow glow.
On occasion, Brown plays with the direction of certain shadows, casting them contrary to sources of light, or forces his figures to register surprise at nothing out of the ordinary. But even these aberrations do not jolt his catalogs of mannerisms into life.
Brown’s last exhibition at Kind presented combinations of paintings and found objects such as ceramic ashtrays and pots. He now continues the series with paintings serving as backdrops for objects related by shape and color.
The effort, as before, is to rescue the work of anonymous craftsmen and put it on the same footing as so-called fine art. However, in so doing, Brown has further reduced the imagination of his pattern-making, giving it the facelessness of wallpaper.
To what end? To elevate ’40s and ’50s kitsch, design items kids think are “cool” because they prompt a campy nostalgia for periods that, in reality, were much more complicated.
This is also the way with Brown’s pure paintings on motifs from Japanese landscapes. Unable to evoke genuine feeling, they succeed in eliciting a burlesque of emotion that is as exaggerated as the “surprised” poses of Brown’s figures.
Once upon a time, when laying claim to the title of social commentator, the artist might have relished living in the atmosphere of the O.J. Simpson civil trial and near the start of Andrew Cunanan’s murderous rampage. But pieces in the present show represent more a vacation from topicality than an engagement with it. Brown here shies away from strong drama as surely as his work was silent about the Vietnamese War in the early 1970s.
Some of the other so-called Chicago Imagists also retreated ever more deeply into personal fantasy, but during the retreat, their command over paint handling deepened. This has not been the case with Brown. His surfaces are as anonymous and dry as ever.
Those who once looked to him for what they assumed was humanistic outrage will now also be disappointed, as at base this is a sad show for a former Chicago artist who for more than 20 years has enjoyed much critical and commercial advantage and has made of it very little.
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The exhibition continues at 313 W. Superior St., through Oct. 5.
