Casey Kaplan
The New Yorker | Goings On About Town
Many galleries have a great interest in pleasure these days. Whether it’s a reaction to covid, and the ensuing isolation, who can say. But figures and light are big at the moment, and the more luscious the use of paint the better. At the Casey Kaplan gallery, through July 29, Judith Eisler’s portraits of film actresses, ranging from the Warhol regular Jane Forth (pictured) to Chloë Sevigny, are filled with a kind of glow. Eisler has both a fan’s and a critic’s relationship to her subjects, women whose strong emotional and physical presence on the screen is mirrored in her dreamscape paintings. The dominant color here is a reddish pink, but the tone of the works is never soft or gooey—Eisler is too critical a thinker to soft-pedal anything. Instead, she wants to convey the mystery inherent in the erotic pull we feel when we look at these stars and when they look at us—or don’t, which, of course, increases our desire, and maybe theirs, too. Eisler’s show is a giant turn-on, one that’s hard to come down from.
Hilton Als
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