WRITING
Unskilled Worker: About a boy and more
October 21, 2024 2:06 pm
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Upon entering Daniel Cooney Fine Art, one is immediately surrounded by a colorful crowd of idiosyncratic boys. As portrait subjects, they feel oddly familiar and distinctive, and their haunting visages might stop you in your tracks. With deep, rich colors the portraits radiate a warm glow, each subject is suffused with a stained-glass brilliance and idealized in an almost spiritual aura. The paintings are the work of London-based Helen Downie, who goes by the moniker Unskilled Worker – a tongue-in-cheek reference to her self-taught background. The exhibition, titled “When You’re a Boy,” features twenty small works composed of dry pastel, gouache, ink, and charcoal that have a matte tactility against their paper grounding. The works are situated somewhere on the spectrum ranging from German Expressionism through Margaret Keane’s kitschy, big eyed portraits to fashion illustration. Downie is highly effective in her use of bleeds, blears, and overlays. In many portraits, eyes tear up along the lower lid, as smeared red lips, blushed cheeks, and constellations of freckles animate the subjects. In Jack Christie, a standout, the subject’s tartan shirt, chest-length and off-center, affords him a dreamy, spectral presence – close yet far away.
This show presents a new body of work from a series that has been under way for over a decade. Downie has worked on the boy portraits in between larger, more intricate compositions, and says they function somewhat like palate-cleansers. In a catalogue that accompanies the show, portrait references cover the walls of her studio and span art history. Like Jackie Gendel’s paintings, Downie’s portraits seem to embody many different acquaintances, actual and mediated. Doxx, adorned with the accessories of a contemporary city-dweller, brings to mind Amy Hill’s funky portraits of children, while the limpid, wide-eyed Long Haired Frankie suggests early Lucian Freud. Downie has collaborated with Gucci and Alexander McQueen on apparel design, and the graphic flamboyance of her work recalls the artist Mycha, who also works at the intersection of art and fashion.
Some of the boys look spooked, disillusioned or innocent, suggestive of dramas or backstories, and their lips, hair, sinews, and creased clothes are stylized as if they were sculpted marble. The double portraits Red Hood Frankie and Blue Hood Frankie could be chiseled, druid guardians flanking the entrance of a sacred space. In many works, elongated noses, philtra, and eyes are suggestive of Modigliani. The subject of Man at Frieze That Became Hugo appears as a schoolboy with lavender eye sockets and straw-colored hair offset by a paisley ascot, his eyes rimmed in a mint green that matches his cardigan sweater. The scuffed, peach ground mirrors the boy’s fleshy face and rosy cheeks.
In Boy Overwhelmed by Marina, with the head slightly turned, and William Farr, where one eye is larger than the other, the portraits seem poignantly brought to life by a series of impressions and memories. Details like an earring, an Adam’s apple, protruding insect-like ears, a Caesar haircut, a T-shirt, and red lips add up to a convincing human presence. The mismatched irregularities make the boys uniquely human and recall Soutine’s compassionate portraits of choirboys, chefs, waiters, and bellboys. Downie outfits her characters in a variety of hoodies, cable knit sweaters, and jewelry, with diverging skin tones and haircuts, evoking different classes and ethnicities. Several boys seem to traverse centuries, embodying all sorts of guys. The subject in Fergal, A Mind’s Eye Boy, with his bowl-cut and buttoned-up shirt, looks like a beatnik, Vauxhall Boy could be a faun from a Balanchine ballet, and Imaginary Boy resembles one of Jean Genet’s rough-trade sailors.
Indeed, Downie’s fixation on arresting male youth mirrors a recurrent theme of much queer literature, not least Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which Aschenbach becomes obsessed with the beautiful young Tadzio. Overall, however, Downie seems to apprehend her portrait subjects in the itinerantly androgynous manner conveyed in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, where the protagonist morphs from one sex into another across eras. In style and substance, the portraits could comfortably fit into a lineage of work that included that of queer, early-twentieth-century American modernists like Charles Demuth and Mardsen Hartley. Downie has noted that the portraits are ultimately exclamations of love, and her affection for her subjects reminded me of Christopher Wood’s Nude Boy in a Bedroom, a tender portrait of his lover, painter Francis Rose.
Downie’s work and biography encourage ruminations on the passage of time, youth, and aging, real life versus virtual reality, and art and fashion. Her hard-scrabble life has encompassed raising four children, struggling with substance abuse, and beating cancer, all before she seriously began painting at age 48. A torrent of Instagram fame ensued when the fashion set, struck by her funky sensibility, embraced her. They were onto something. Downie has drawn on her own dramatic history to capture the essence of many people and places, yielding a rich and singular body of work.
Daniel Cooney Fine Art: Unskilled Worker, When You’re a Boy”, 2024, Installation View
“Unskilled Worker: When You’re a Boy,” Daniel Cooney Fine Art, 508–526 West 26th Street, #9C, New York, NY. Through October 26, 2024.