Gezellig
John Currin's Gezellig is an important painting that forms part of his recent series inspired by pornographic imagery. The dramtatic foreshortening of this composition is designed to challenge the viewer to look up at the figure's face, the usual first point of call in observing humans in real life or representations. Yet the eye is continually confronted with the figure's nakedness and undulating expanse of creamy white flesh that eventually leads to a detached expression. In this delightfully perverse painting, Currin cunningly recruits the viewer into this perspective, which is at once shocking and arousing.
Controversial and driven by his own unique vision, Currin has been heralded as one of the most important artists of his generation and in the powerful position of re-directing people back to discussions of painting's relevance. With Gezellig he appears to play on the idea of painting as fetish object, doomed to be a victim of the lustful, objectifying male voyeur, while humorously re-casting the subject of Gustav Courbet's erotic masterpiece L'Origine du monde (1866) as a slightly bored, middle-class intellectual.
A further clue to understanding Currin's fusion of serious painterly concerns with imagery that courts the absurd lies in the titles of his works. Many of the porn inspired paintings are named after the places and people of Northern Europe, including Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Malmö, and The Danes. Gezellig itself takes its title from a Dutch word meaning cozy, friendly, or relaxing. Such references draw a connection to the stereotype of permissive sexual attitudes in these countries. They also hint at a kernel of the idea that prompted Currin to begin the series in the first place, namely the Muhammad cartoon controversy that was unfolding in Northern Europe at the time they were painted. Currin's reaction to the debate about free expression was to present a kind of satire of a libertine socialist Europe through the medium of pornography. But ultimately this complex argument was put aside as an excuse to make beautiful paintings full of animation and the delicate textures and hues of warm, naked skin.
Currin recognizes that porn as a subject matter is loaded with cliché: from its tired photographic conventions, to the standard condemnation of its sexist values, to its frequent use in art as a symbol of personal liberation. Currin's conceptual program involves assimilating the inherent corruption of this visual system and re-presenting it in a traditionally elevated form to not only disturb society's, and more specifically the art world's, established taboos, but also to reinvigorate his medium and the genre of figurative painting in general.
