Paintings

Elliott Templeton Fine Arts is delighted to present a solo exhibition of paintings by New York City-based artist David Johansen. These are not portraits, they are icons. The men Johansen has painted seem to represent an inscrutable ideal; a louche, detached masculinity, equal parts provocative and serene. A pencil-mustachioed street fighter cleaning his painted nails with a knife. A hollow-eyed drunk picking his vampire sharp teeth with a straw. A young doctor (or a student? or a savant?) posing as if for an identification photo before a glittery gold backdrop. An olive-suited man in a fez on a rooftop, lounging before a midnight crescent moon. Each is presented within a painted ornate gold frame, securing their iconography. Many of the men in Johansen’s paintings wear red fez caps, a motif which he explains with characteristic ambiguity: “Sometimes if I think it needs some red, I’ll put a fez on it.” Johansen makes saints out of sinners; the fez caps may function as halos. As Johansen says, “put a halo on it, and it’s a quasi-icon.” A further hint at the apotheosis at work is the inclusion of the Hindu deity Shiva, pictured here with his consort Shakti and the baby form of the elephant god Ganesh. In this context, the bejeweled technicolor religious image seems more like a quotidian family. When anyone can be a figure of worship, maybe the gods are free to be people. The portraits are textured, embellished, and bedazzled. Johansen sculpts the acrylic metallic paint by adding layer upon layer to create a relief map—noses and eyebrows protrude impishly, jewelry glitters, and hair parts in sculptured tresses. They have the look of being painted in nail polish, shimmering wet pop frozen glamor. David Johansen is best known as a singer and songwriter, beginning his career as the frontman of the seminal rock band The New York Dolls. In later musical projects, he reinvented himself as the pompadoured Buster Poindexter. He was recently the subject of the Martin Scorsese documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only. This is the first solo exhibition of Johansen’s paintings. —Leah Hennessey