One of the two reasons I’ve never written before (for publication) about Doug
Hilson’s paintings is because I know him so well. You see, when a critic is
personally very close to an artist the perspective on his work gets a little
skewed. It’s a little bit like trying to decide whether a television program is
any good while you’re watching it with your nose pressed against the glass of
the screen. I met Hilson soon after I moved to NewYork in 1985, was a
teaching colleague of his for a few years, and still see him all the time today.
(We live about four blocks apart in Manhattan, in Tribeca, the art world’s
equivalent of a Greek fishing village.) We jog together, have little family
dinners together, and trade tasteless comments on the news events of the
day. Hilson even serves as my sanity-preserver: he’s the guy to whom I send
my monthly collections of annotated idiotic art-world press releases—stuffed
in a manila folder and labeled The Hilson File—so that he can tell me
whether I’m wrong to despise the stuff so much. (In some cases, he reannotates them and sends them back to me.) In short, without Hilson, I’d be
a very lonely and confused boy.
The other reason is that I have this fetish about my alleged “integrity”
as a critic. I have no overriding field theory about the nature of
modern/contemporary/postmodern art, belong to no esthetic camp, hang out
with no particular clique of artists or dealers or curators, and haven’t staked
my dubious reputation on a bet that art is going off in any particular
direction after the millenium. Like, I’m “independent.” That’s all well and
good, but I carry it further. If somebody is as deft a draftsman as Hilson is, I
wonder, can his paintings really have any structural grit? If somebody can
come up with an original kind of figuration (as Hilson has with his strafer’seye view of lipstick skyscrapers massed in tuna-can metropoli) and spread it
over large canvases with the compositional force and subtlety of an
accomplished abstract expressionist, can his churning painterly waters really
run that deep? And if an artist can be so funny (Hilson could do a whole other
retrospective exhibition and thick catalogue from the ongoing saga of his
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fictive “Doug’s Museum”), can his overall artistic project be profound? The
obvious answers (when you look at Hilson’s paintings) are yes, yes and yes.
But I’ve fought them for years because I don’t want to be seduced by
personality, buddied into critical support, or led laughing into approving a
style that violates my own grudgingly minimalist personal sensibilities.
“Lighten up,” you might say. Well, I have, and this short essay is the
proof.
A few words, then, about how Hilson’s paintings got this way. He’s a
seasoned painter (painting has its occasional prodigies, but it’s generally
done better by people who’ve hung out with its nuances for a while; sorry,
kids), who’ve been through a few stylistic changes, learned from them, and,
in the substrata of their esthetic consciousnesses, consolidated. Back in the
mid-1960s, when he was just out of graduate school, Hilson painted big, bold,
geometric abstractions. That approach metamorphosed—while he taught at a
major university in the midwest (19tk-tk)—into what I’d call a kind of
cornfield pschedelia. When he blew off the security of academic position and
tenure to move to New York in 1979, he also jettisoned his buzzing,
repetitive, imaginary imagery in favor of (starting about 19tk) a hardcore
examination of realism. (We’re talking portraits, the severest test of realist
facility.) Gradually, Hilson became dissatisfied with the recitation of drawing
skill (the ‘80s portraits were mostly large charcoal and graphite drawings),
even in the service of a sentimental visual poetry. So the portraits became
figures; the figures became more generic; the context of the figures (mirrors,
dressing tables) became more important; and the painting of them grew
more, well, painterly.
In the present work—that is, the work in this exhibition representing
a long moment that began in 1989—the human likeness has nominally
vanished. Actually, it’s still around, haunting the paintings in a thousand
represented artifacts. Other aspects of Hilson’s esthetic traversement over the
years are still resonantly present, too: bold geometry in the base
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compositions, “psychedelia” in the woozy angles of vision, buzzing
repetitiveness in the metaphorical cities of sheer stuff, and the acumen of an
accomplished realist in practically every pat of paint.
But what’s most important about Hilson’s paintings is that they have
what most “serious” sophisticated painting—necessarily anxious in this art
age of anti-painting—doesn’t: honest ambition without bombast, and
genuinely “felt” content (the ambiguity of “masculine” and “feminine”
artifacts) without extroverted self-pity. Doug Hilson is simply a very good
painter who takes what he feels about the world around him and pushes it
through very difficult painterly problems in order to create works of art that
are even better than the sum of his considerable emotions and abilities. I’m
happy to have finally realized that.
--- Peter Plagens