Samuel Guy: Bildungsroman

Bildungsroman 

by Madeleine Bialke

 

Many of these painters have at one time dressed with intent, stood in front of a mirror and painted that framed visage; an ego show and tell. At times Guy disguises himself as other painters, ‘Ralph Mayer, Velazquez, and Paintings in the National Gallery,’ ‘Arnolfini Camo, and ‘Pyle’s Pirate,’ are clear allusions, and ‘Brown Hoodie,’ a tribute to Zurburan.

But in most paintings, Guy is disguised as himself. The paint builds up, admitting the struggle in the fervent pursuit of self-actualization. Because to fully explain a body that is perpetually changing substance and proportion (contingent on sustenance, sleep, water, outlook) is a nonviable task. Each painting consists of multiple sessions edited to a mere blip in time. These moments are not chronological nor inherently place-bound, they are tethered to a chaotic chart of moods and fictions that swirl around a person. This exhibition makes universal the search for a lasting self-presence.

Another aspect of the work is the darkness and humor of performative masculinity. Guy distorts his figure so that his body appears larger than proportional, too big for his head. At times he swims in clothing as if his feet are in shoes too big to fill, trying to fit into the unsustainable shape of an American man. How to honor this history while sloughing off the embedded danger? As both the painter and subject, he looks back at the mirror, trapped in perpetual becoming; in an adolescence without end.

There is additional tension in being both the artist and the carpenter, the hands-on workman and erudite academic. The panels are as precise as the paint application is raw and rough. This struggle reaches harmony in the live edge of the panel that echoes the fragile deckled edge of drawing paper. The paintings are intentionally small, so that to look at them closely is still to see the contents from far away, blurred by the texture and pace of the paint.

This group of portraits makes real the idea that an accumulation of replicas with subtle alterations becomes something incredibly beautiful and strange. Guy’s face— wane and drawn; serious, concerned, or self-effacing; always looking back— is the key to the code. This is a summation of the minute portions of self-image that are fleeting, visible in a moment, and average out only over time. Bildugsroman presents a coming-of-age in fits and starts, no eureka moment. The figure in the paintings is trapped in the fiction of who a painter is, in conflict of who a man should or could be. And in ‘Night Painting’, the final fade to black; presenting the ineffability of a static self, and the impossibility of a clear resolution. That to come to age, fully, is to be rendered obsolete, reduced to skull.