Keith Sklar
"Keith Sklar's Heroes"
Rosamund Felson Gallery, Los Angeles
October, 1999

Keith Sklar's paintings refuse to allow themselves to be seen in the way in which we normally look at paintings. It is not just that they reject the casual glance-though to this all-too-common gallery-goer's practice they are likely to be plain offensive. There is nothing conventionally easy or attractive about these writhing, tortured, clotted surfaces. More importantly, however, their involuted turbulence has a lot to hide from the eye that refuses to engage them. Stand a fraction to the left or the right in front of any one of this new series of large-scale works that celebrate Sklar's "Heroes," and the central image is literally swallowed up in the mass of paint and attached material. Stand dead center only, in a place where the figure keeps struggling to constitute itself out of the surrounding chaos, and we get the flattened, photographic view that only hints at the frenetic relief that is the very nature and substance of the work.

We have to move. The painting moves us. It is aggressively ill-mannered in its demands, drawing us in and pushing us away rudely, in an experience that continually forces us to consider where we stand at every moment in relation to it. It will not stand still for anyone, nor will it permit us to stand still for it. The experience it offers is temporal and shifting, as inexorably trivial and as richly significant as our lives themselves, becoming its own history in the viewing process even as insists on revealing the process of its creation. These paintings are not about the two-dimensional surface but rather about the very substance of paint, an apt and deeply discomfiting metaphor for the stuff that persists in attaching itself to us-and to which we stubbornly cling-in an age that is characterized by its raging materialism.

Who are Sklar's heroes? Muhammad Ali, Philip Guston, Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Eleanor Roosevelt, Raul Robeson… They come from the worlds of sports and politics, religion and art. The aura of each carries with it a special purity, a kind of benign innocence, a refusal to submit to the cultural clichés we use for convenience and comfort, to scale them down to size. Each one of them is a Quixote to whom the artist-and we along with him-plays Sancho Panza, enthralled by a vision so far beyond our own capacity to dare that we are awed, as a society, into a need at once to idolize and to martyr them. In Sklar's paintings they are glutted with the flotsam of cultural and art historical reference. They are up to their eyes in the toxic trash of civilization. The artist himself pillories them with paint. And yet they stand, irrefutably heroic.

Sklar refers to his process as "reverse trompe l'oeil." Instead of using art to trick the eye into a belief that what it sees is real, he borrows objects from "real life" and distorts them beyond recognition into the raw material of art. He begins with the familiar, degenerated artifacts that glut our lives from childhood on, from plastic dinosaurs to the toys of modern warfare, from living room kitsch to the bottles and cans and tupperware we use to package our consumer products-the kind of superfluous clutter that proliferates at swap meets and garage sales. Coating these objects with multiple layers of paint, he then peels off the skins, more or less intact, to create the misshapen, sometimes unrecognizable molds that become the ungainly attachments to his canvases.

An intuitive painter, Sklar earned what he likes to call his "chops" as a muralist in the Bay Area, on the length and breadth of monumentally-scaled walls. As a result, he brings to his current paintings an eye that has learned to articulate a coherent network of events and formal relationships in an expansive surface, of which the artist himself can see only a small part at any one time. As viewers, we are offered the benefit of distance as well as the intimacy of detail: when we stand a good way out from his Joan of Arc, for instance, the figure of the adolescent saint emerges boldly, armored, astride a warhorse bedecked with the trappings its trade. At that vulnerable and intimate place between her legs is revealed the wound-at once literal and metaphorical-from which blood flows; and the outline of a testicle, along with a prominent green projection at the same location, suggests her androgyny, the as yet unformed sexual identity of this warrior-teenager. Beneath the horse's feet, we are offered a visual reference to the still newly-shocking images of contemporary adolescents, the ones who were wounded or killed in the recent high school massacre in Colorado, reminding us painfully of the universal terror of that period of life, the tyranny of the hormones, the agony of the journey that leads us all from protected childhood to the self-responsibility of the adult.

Still further afield in the same picture, we discover views of a city, a battlefield, the evocation of a pastoral scene, all orchestrated to work together in the rhythms of the total picture plane. And within this overall field, at every moment, the eye is held up on its journey by some new detail that surprises or delights, adding its weight to the physical, emotional and intellectual complexity of the whole. Sklar overwhelms us with a plethora of images-watching eyes, scrawled genitalia, a hovering helicopter, a carrousel, cartoon animals, toys-many of them presented in the clumsy, spontaneous rendering of a child's hand that heightens our sense of the raw, uncensored, primal psychodrama of adolescence in which we are involved, and in which we cannot fail to find the sometimes tortured reflection of our own experience.

Sklar seems obsessed with the need to cram the totality of all possible experience into each of his spaces, from the broad sweep of history and socio-cultural context to the most intimate hidden detail of the personal psyche. Not that we read each one of these images as an individual image, nor even that we are required to identify them all. It is a process of accretion, an age-old epic device which achieves its effect through encyclopedic superfluity and repetition. As viewers, we dance in and out as best we can, feeling the weight and dodging the impediments. The details that we miss this time around will be waiting to surprise us on another visit, perhaps only moments later, for we can exhaust neither the meaning nor the experience of these paintings: what strikes us at one reading as caustic or satirical may melt into humorous sentiment at the next. What reads like a horror story at this moment may at the next read more like slapstick farce. The paintings will not stand still in this sense, either. And, short of turning our backs on them and walking away, they nowhere allow us to remain neutral.

In a sense, each one of these homages to heroes can be read as a self-portrait, a relentless exploration of the shadow world of the artist's mind. The canvas becomes the repository for everything that churns up from the depths of the soul, the garbage pail of the psyche. Each one conveys a sense of personal risk, not only as an edgy aesthetic object whose good taste, by any conventional standards, is questionable at best; but also because they are excruciatingly self-revelatory in their obsessions. Sklar is unafraid to show the petulant child in him, even as he shows the unresolved and turbulent teeanger and the intellectual adult. Almost in the same breath we find him quoting liberally from one of his great inspirations, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and offering a scatalogical aside. He can be tender and brutal all at the same time, dead serious and wildly funny. It is in revealing the depths of his own most personal brilliance and shadows, I believe, that he is able to communicate at the universal level of what we each know about our public and our secret selves. When we explore these portraits of his heroes fully and honestly, we are liable to discover that they are also portraits of ourselves.

It is this impassioned concern with the untidy complexity of being an artist and at the same time being human, I believe, that sets Sklar's work as a painter apart from that of many of his contemporaries. In "Heroes (Philip Guston)" he allows himself to poke sly fun at some of the hip new painting of the nineties, all nicely packaged, well positioned for the market, strategized for success; while Guston, the hero, boozy and confused, self-destructive cigarette in hand, presides disconsolately over the messy stuff of painting and of life. At a historical moment when young painters we are casting about for a new sense of how painting can be reconceived, Sklar has found a way to take it into the murky depths of soul. In doing so, he throws down a challenging and highly personal gauntlet that demands to be picked up.