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Karel Funk: 303 Gallery.


The great recycling bin in which art history, critical theory, and market analysis dispose of their castoffs is crawling with post-ironic ironists scavenging scavenging

of anesthetic. See anesthetic scavenging.
 for material not yet reworked. And as anyone who has browsed for high-end vintage clothing knows, "composite neo-retro" can look fabulous. Karel Funk is one such smart ragpicker, assembling an audacious mix of clashing styles and strategies that takes in Ellsworth Kelly, Alex Katz and Andy Warhol, Northern Renaissance altarpieces, photorealism photorealism, international art movement of the late 1960s and 70s that stressed the precise rendering of subject matter, often taken from actual photographs or painted with the aid of slides. , and the J. Crew catalogue, as well as, of course, "the male gaze."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Key to this eclecticism eclecticism, in art
eclecticism (ĭklĕk`tĭsĭz'əm), art style in which features are borrowed from various styles.
 is extreme simplicity. The eleven paintings in Funk's first solo show all adopt the same format. Each is a roughly square wood panel less than twenty-four inches across depicting, in acrylic, the head and shoulders of a college-age man. The faces of the painter's young subjects are obscured by the geometries of brightly colored GORE-TEX hoods, collars, and visors, the precise details of their skin and hair picked out against a stark blank ground. All of the men are white, and not one of them meets our eyes.

Formally Funk's paintings are studies in angles. Like Kelly he enjoys abutting sharp lozenges of color to construct deceptively flat spaces; as in Katz there is the suggestion that the planar clarity of his compositions be taken as symbolic of his sitters' personalities or lack thereof. Slippery and inorganic, the structural fabric of the pictures shapes their emotional detachment; like models in advertisements, these characters are their clothes. Locked into traditional head-on, profile, or three-quarter views, Funk's subjects withdraw into their jackets' shiny folds as if the rumpled triangle of a red or apple-green hood pushed back on the shoulders or the blue curve of one pulled over the head could stand as emblems of a monastic order. Their downcast down·cast  
adj.
1. Directed downward: a downcast glance.

2. Low in spirits; depressed. See Synonyms at depressed.


downcast
Adjective

1.
 expressions are variously demure de·mure  
adj. de·mur·er, de·mur·est
1. Modest and reserved in manner or behavior.

2. Affectedly shy, modest, or reserved. See Synonyms at shy1.
, sullen, or contemplative. Modestly handsome, young, and equipped for sport, these guys are automatically desirable. But their perfect vacancy slips past the fresh-faced virility Virility
See also Beauty, Masculine; Brawniness.

Fury, Sergeant

archetypal he-man. [Comics: “Sergeant Fury and His Howling Commandos” in Horn, 607–608]

Henry, John
 peddled by The North Face to congeal con·geal  
v. con·gealed, con·geal·ing, con·geals

v.intr.
1. To solidify by or as if by freezing: "My aim . . . was to take the Hill by storm before . . .
 in motionless enigma. We are drawn to them, but their static/vatic silence yields no access.

Given Funk's savvy, this vacuum of desirous de·sir·ous  
adj.
Having or expressing desire; desiring: Both sides were desirous of finding a quick solution to the problem.



de·sir
 attention easily accommodates art ideas--skillful, handmade painting lives parasitically off photography; our urge toward cathexis cathexis /ca·thex·is/ (kah-thek´sis) conscious or unconscious investment of psychic energy in a person, idea, or any other object.cathec´tic

ca·thex·is
n. pl.
 with a sexy or otherwise special individual rebounds as admonishment about commodity and spectacle. More interesting is Funk's return to discussions about what it means to look libidinally at passive, attractive bodies arrayed for us by a painter who has also, by implication, looked at, framed, and possessed them. Granted, the religious donors and house-proud burghers Burghers (bûr`gərz), in the 18th cent., a party of the Secession Church of Scotland, resulting from one of the "breaches" in the history of Presbyterianism.  depicted by Funk's Flemish masters expected to receive greedy gazes, too. But the exemplary piety of their averted eyes and the wealth of their draped textiles are self-consciously, self-praisingly on display. Attaching their names to their likenesses (like figures by Warhol or Katz), such sitters let it be known that they colluded with their portraitists. By contrast Funk's anonymous models serve him by rendering up their faces as mute, scopic texture--they do not act; they appear. The traditional object in such circumstances is, of course, female, and displayed en deshabille. Thus undergirding Funk's endeavor are equations proposing that girl = boy, nude = covered, and possession = emptiness. Funk is, frankly, a fetishist. The tiny red tab of a zipper, the pores on a chin, or the glimpse of a contrasting T-shirt hidden under a parka enact an obsession that replaces the whole with the part, like Degas's thing for tutus or Ingres's long, fleshlike swatches of satin. When the bundled-up, white, Ivy League dude is posed like a saint in a niche or a john in a mug shot--and the result reads as an airless, uncarnal odalisque, virgin or maja--the homoerotic ho·mo·e·rot·ic  
adj.
1. Of or concerning homosexual love and desire.

2. Tending to arouse such desire.

Adj. 1.
 gaze is on its way to polymorphous neutrality. What happens next?
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No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
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Title Annotation:NEW YORK
Author:Richard, Frances
Publication:Artforum International
Geographic Code:1USA
Date:Nov 1, 2004
Words:630
Previous Article:Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler: Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria.(NEW YORK)
Next Article:Fred Wilson: Studio Museum in Harlem.(NEW YORK)
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