Emily Eveleth by Miles McEnery Gallery

EMILY EVELETH

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

EMILY!EVELETH By Jackson Arn If Susan Sontag had been a painter instead of a writer—if she’d had the same tastes and ideas but worked them into pictures rather than words—she might have painted like Emily Eveleth. For those who care to look, Eveleth’s images are full of Sontagian morsels: Camp, the leveling of meaning, and (especially) the erotics of art. There’s more than a li!le Sontag, too, in the way the form fits, and doesn’t fit, the content— the refined style wrapped around a faint, yet persistent, naughtiness. That, at least, is one way of describing Eveleth’s paintings. A simpler one is that Emily Eveleth paints donuts. Glazed, powdered, cream- or jelly-filled; sometimes one at a time, sometimes stacked or side-by-side; nearly all purchased from local establishments in Massachuse!s, Eveleth’s longtime home (not to mention one of the great pastry Meccas of the United States). Donuts have kept her busy for nearly thirty years. To put that number in perspective, Claude Monet painted and repainted the Rouen Cathedral for about three years, and Andy Warhol burned out on cans of Campbell’s Soup in less than one. The Campbell’s comparison is especially instructive. Like Warhol, Eveleth paints cheap, unglamorous, American food. Unlike Warhol, Eveleth can actually—how to put this?—paint. Educated at Smith College and the Massachuse!s College of Art, proudly indebted to Caravaggio and Francisco de Zurbarán, she goes about her business as if rumors of the End of Art have been greatly exaggerated. Whatever her images are, they’re assuredly not Pop Art. Warhol sees his subject through layers of irony that he never escapes (nor seems to want to escape); the result, at least to my mind, is a huddle of mumbly, adolescent images that trail oﬀ just as they’re starting to say something interesting. There’s a healthy amount of irony in Eveleth’s donut paintings, too, but she’s too jazzed on the technical and psychological possibilities of her subject to se!le for irony. Her new canvases are medium-sized, neither monumental nor precious—donut portraits, you might say. If you study them together, you may

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), L’Origine du monde, 1866, Oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski

Marquis de Sade, The Bedroom Philosophers, 1957 published by Olympia Press, Paris, France Numbered 49 in The Traveller’s Companion Series

have the intuition that this is the size donuts really are; by making them larger than life, paradoxically, Eveleth has made them life-sized, as in alive and breathing—not dough and jelly but flesh and blood.

poses as a nude model in a figure drawing class, or the nude lovers in the pages of the Kama Sutra.

I’ve beaten around the bush long enough—Eveleth’s donut paintings are absurdly, unmissably, heart-racingly sexual. It’s not just that she makes fried dough look fleshy; there are times when her brushstrokes are so silky and her cropping so extreme that you forget that what you’re looking at is supposed to be anything but flesh. And she’s fond of pricking flesh-dough with slimy red orifices that seem, like the genitalia in Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, to pull the rest of the composition into their orbit. There are pert, symmetrical, smu!y donuts (Odyssey), and flabby orgies of donuts pressing themselves into pancakes (The Organization, The Bedroom Philosophers), and donut couples glaze-glued together (Innocence). One of the many delights of Eveleth’s oeuvre is the vast number of ways she has found to look at her subject, so that a humble dessert takes on as many expressive

Everything is about sex, the joke goes, except sex, which is about power. I’m reminded of this when I look at Eveleth’s work: Sex is always there, to be sure, but just out of view, and the more explicitly it’s suggested the more it comes to seem like a cipher for something else. At a glance, The Watcher and the Watched, a particularly in-yourface Courbet homage, might look more like pornography than erotic art, but that pornographic literalism creates its own peculiar set of metaphors. The incontinent hole leaking thick, dark fluid, suggests any number of out-there associations: the origin of the world and its end, a wound, a mouth, and even—thanks in part to the title—an eye. Eveleth has lots of fun with her titles, all of which are based on books published by the legendarily taboo-breaking Olympia Press, among them the Marquis de Sade’s The Bedroom Philosophers. Her titles may be clues, or winks, or red herrings, or a bit

of all three. The de Sade allusion emphasizes a bawdy streak that was already baldly apparent in the painting; in other cases, however, the words hold sex at an ironic genteel distance. (I can’t read the words, The Quintessence of Debauchery, without picturing Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell clutching her pearls.) Other titles tut-tut us for sniﬃng out the sex that Eveleth plainly wants us to sniﬀ. A painting called Innocence, which shows sugary pink juices running sweatily down a donut’s underside, may be plenty of things, but innocent is not one of them.

to, the hyperbole of food advertising. Elsewhere (the foreground of Odyssey is a prime example), she paints smooth, glowing glazes and jellies, but in rough, cracked, dirty strokes that become more menacing the longer you stare at them. Plenty of artists have painted food that looks good enough to eat; plenty of others have painted food that looks ro!en or sickly. Here, too, Eveleth’s trick is to have it both ways: to evoke, in the same image, the bright, lush, all-American lawn from the opening scene of Blue Velvet as well as the gnashing insects hiding beneath it.

Entire books could be wri!en about this painter’s use of pink—pink, the color of raw muscle and pale skin vexed to a blush, but also of plastic lawn flamingos and Valentine’s Day schmaltz. Eveleth knows how to have it both ways. In Pleasures and Follies of a Good Natured Libertine, one kind of pink curdles into the other; what’s sensual and intimate grows tacky and lukewarm, with a strong chemical odor. But one pink doesn’t triumph over the other any more than folly triumphs over pleasure; each holds the other steady, creating a host of associations that haunt you well a$er you’ve looked away. And Eveleth does more with black and white than most painters can do with the entire rainbow. Curtain features a stack of donuts leaking (or is it bleeding?) jelly against an inky black backdrop, but the lower-right corner is a bright, almost overexposed-looking white—a nod to the street photography of Weegee, with his flashbulb ambushes of New Yorkers caught in mid-sin. All the new paintings are based on photographs, and it shows, not just in the glare of the light but in the confident, improvisational energy of the framing: In Curtain or Without Shame or The Quintessence of Debauchery, you feel the li!le aha of catching someone in the middle of something, like a gossip-rag paparazzo craning through a crack in the bedroom door.

“The flight from interpretation,” Sontag wrote, “seems particularly a feature of modern painting.” That was in 1964. Too many recent paintings, or so I’ve felt lately, wear their interpretations—much like their “politics”—with pride. Eveleth is doing something more diﬃcult. Incapable of choir-preaching or gimmick-shilling, she has found a subject that flits hummingbird-like between many meanings without resting for too long on any single one. More generally, her work is a celebration of things that are sometimes presumed to be in decline: elegant oil-on-canvas still lifes; eroticism that comes in carefully measured drips instead of gallons; art that isn’t explicitly, thuddingly about The Way We Live Now (and therefore has a good shot at surviving well a$er we move on). All of which is to say, these donuts are built to last.

I’m going in circles: Eveleth’s paintings are about sex, but then again they’re not, but then again they are, in the sense that they’re about everything. With repetition, the beauty of her fast-food still lifes becomes a kind of sensuality, which grows into outright sexuality before veering oﬀ into disgust or loneliness or violence. None of this would be possible without Eveleth’s technical mastery, her ability to say one thing with a brushstroke even as its thickness and color and opacity say half a dozen others. In Boudoir, she uses a wax medium to give the canvas a powdery glow and make the donut seem supernatural, almost gravity-defying—a parody of, but also an homage

Jackson Arn’s writing has appeared in The Nation, Art in America, and Lapham’s Quarterly. He is a contributing critic for The Forward and writes a monthly column for 3Quarks Daily.

Abandon, 2021 Oil on panel 26 x 18 inches 66 x 45.7 cm

Boudoir, 2021 Oil on panel 26 x 18 inches 66 x 45.7 cm

Chariot of Flesh, 2021 Oil on panel 26 x 18 inches 66 x 45.7 cm

Curtain, 2021 Oil on panel 26 x 18 inches 66 x 45.7 cm

Innocence, 2021 Oil and collage on panel 26 x 18 inches 66 x 45.7 cm

Odyssey, 2021 Oil on panel 26 x 18 inches 66 x 45.7 cm

Pearls of the Rainbow, 2021