Julian Schnabel: Recent Works
29 March – 20 April 2009
Fortune Cookies Projects (Singapore)

It is possibly one of the art world’s big little ironies that one of the hardest hit country in Southeast Asia by the current economic crisis is playing host to 80s  ‘neo-expressionist’ extraordinaire, Julian Schnabel, who led the charge in painting’s postmodern renaissance and whose seemingly soaring fame and ego was pretty much neutered by the financial meltdown of ’87.

This decline was however a blessing in disguise. Schnabel’s transformation from the plate-smashing darling of the New York art world into  a sensitive bio-pic art-house film director has rewarded us thus far with three remarkable features and a rollicking documentary on Lou Reed – a film career that is growing from strength to strength.

This, however, cannot be said for his recent paintings that were brought in by Fortune Cookies Projects. Amidst the hype and clamour that poured into the stylish whitecube/warehouse of Art Space @ Helutrans on the opening night, an overdose of glitz and polite conversations abound. Paintings – largely gestural splashes and textured layers of paint (at times coated with epoxy) on digital prints of Hindu religious icons and x-rayed spinal chords – were muted by the enormity of the space, unjustifiably contextualised by a poorly printed slab of  wall text and a hazardously laid-out catalogue. Twenty years from his heyday as New York’s bad boy, the arrival of Schnabel on our shores seems a little all too belated.

As gallery spaces have expanded over the last two decades to engulf installation-based practices that have produced bigger spectacles probably beyond the wildest imagination of Situationist Guy Debord, all of a sudden, big broad gestural strokes on canvases don’t seem so sensational anymore. Why is it then necessary for us (here on the opposite side of the planet) to revisit this crucially embarrassing period for painting?

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Tanya Soong has more than a passing interest in contemporary art, film, theatre and politics.