When a sensitive vampire in the midst of a twilight rendez-vous misconstrues an intended love object and kisses instead an Elizabeth Peyton puckered lip painted representation, his normal reaction is “I know you.” That should not surprise any viewer of her work, for the presumably unacknowledged symbiosis between Peyton’s oeuvre and the current teen heartthrob movie money maker, Twilight, screams shared dessert.

This subliminally bill boarded mutualism was well illustrated in the just closed (January 11) one hundred work survey at the New Museum in NYC’s LES, a collection of her work that would hold its own in a fictional double-featured presentation. Peyton is acclaimed as a unified phenomenon: young, hip, connected in the fashion, art, music, moneyed zeitgeist, successful--average selling price being $600,000--yet cautiously aloof in a framed genteel sensitivity, encapsulated in centered edginess.

If Kurt Cobain, the subject of one of Peyton’s countless portraits, went the vampire route or at least contemplated such after a Twilight screening, he would be up to read the exhibition’s title, Live Forever. Cobain’s opulently accentuated red lips mirror Edward, Twilight’s vampire come-on with his finite self-indulged configured moodiness: the clichéd Peyton rendered hypersensitivity does induce an appreciative comfort setting. However, her so very, very Fauve inspired colors, and their inability, even when masterly applied, fail to shake the implied tragic stagnancy from the suggested considerable contemplative capacity her portraits’ subjects are subject to, as they trespass Twilight’s formidable sodden terrain. The difficulty lies in the hackneyed thematic setup, the light FM easy listening beauty of it all and the willingness to like this stuff.

Sensitive, young, sexy, good looking people, smart, even if only so alluded – resultant substantiation, an outer space expectation – are, of course, always welcome by all. Nothing unusual in the film or paintings’ appeal, nothing thematically unique to our time: caught in a bleakness, the sensitive ones only could fathom, held to the fence of sexual want. In Peyton’s case, her subjects are immobilized by an unwarranted roadblock: well-dressed malaise, and in Twilight, the misty despair glows in the immediate affiliation between Edward and his never to be loved Bella. No-cavity Edward, the nice well-meaning vampire, and Bella, attract arduously to a diligent handshake sexuality, presumably geared to activate consummation, a condition, that is passion, antithetical to vampire logic: if he bites her, his only sexual path as corporeally defined, she is finished, if she sleeps with him, he is root canal. They look good, are singular in their realizations of their uniqueness; however, competition is unknown in their dumpy polluted psycho-tropic drug needy town.

Sexual tease and unrequited want permeate Peyton’s work and yet not a dangled tooth is in sight. A financially secure oversensitivity conveys the disavowed correctness of it all. Their thoughtfully focused lethargy provides a syntactically accepted autoeroticism, if they are lucky. These paintings state they hold firmer ground than a cult teeny bopper vampire film. Peyton unwittingly pictures the viewers’ and her own dissolution in their ease to hold the composite attractiveness, a groupie reciprocity: a blurred twilight continence.

~Alan Nadler

Solo Exhibitions, 2009
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; February 14 - June 14
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; April 1 - June 21

Peyton is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK