Interview

LY: And then you ended up with a 1994 residency at the University of Tennessee.

RP: It was a great way to begin experimenting and to make a lot of paintings. And when I came back to New York, I was struck by the enormity of cosmopolitan life and how much one was assaulted by fashion imagery in advertisements on every possible surface. I found one painting of a woman with a cold-cream mask on her face—it was in a book about what to do after a divorce. It was from the 1970s and was an iconic image about being brought out of a malaise. Then, walking home late one night, I found stacks of 1960s and ’70s stock photography and fashion magazines that a photographer who was moving had put out on the street. I carried home as much as I could. I literally took someone’s recycling and came up with 13 images that seemed to correspond to one another and support this idea of a disengaged, disembodied psychological state in absolutely beautiful images. And they became my first show at Edward Thorp Gallery in SoHo—the images of fashion models.

LY: Right. I remember they were kind of frightening because of their scale.

RP: Around seven feet high . . . I wanted them to be read quickly, like a Pop painting. I wanted to rob Pop of its commercial feeling and re-embody it with beauty in oil painting. I didn’t change the images, other than to paint them as beautifully as I could.

LY: They’re not just about beauty, but an idealized, impossible beauty.

RP: Exactly. It was fascinating to find the outside limit of desire that you see in fashion advertising. It was a way to consider how painting could be used for its manipulative power. The idea was no longer to critique power structures through mimicry but to find the messages in them and let them work on the mind differently. People get confused when they see my shows, but that isn’t the intention. My intention is to destabilize the act of seeing.

LY: Fashion does kind of consume everything.

RP: An exhibition put up right now that does not address the critical situation we’re facing just becomes paintertainment.

LY: Paintertainment!

RP: Seriously. At its core this show is the conflict between capitalism, fascism, and communism. It looks into the nature of representation, propaganda, and misinformation, and how they redirect the ideologies of institutions. Verism was the beginning of that.

LY: Verism?

RP: It’s not well known. There was a belief after World War I that painting could be an act of civil revolt. I want this exhibition, “New Museum,” to be an act of civil disobedience. It’s not so much about the New Museum on the Bowery, but the idea of challenging museums as projections of cultural authority. It’s painting as insurgency.

LY: A couple of exhibitions ago, at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery, you showed a painting of George W. Bush on a pretty, pink background. I hated to see such a good painting of an evil guy.

RP: It wasn’t a glorifying image—unless you wanted it to be. He gained control through apathy. People did not come out to vote against him. For me, that painting was an icon of an absence of conviction. It was a passive image of the most powerful man on earth. I put him between two pink panels, which were the context of a Donna Karan lingerie ad.And that show opened three days before 9/11.

Linda Yablonsky is an art writer and novelist in, of, and about New York.