There are artists who protest too much. And they often find an audience, half-grateful, willing to defer to the presumed authority of their declarations on meaning. This simplifies matters. Or so Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924) would have one think.

 His canvases, heaped with images, are offered as meaningless. One might dismiss this as merely disingenuous, and leave it at that. But while the artist may disown his metaphors, the world cannot so easily be stripped of them. Pearlstein’s consistent pairing of objects and naked human bodies is not merely a series inventive, but empty, free associations.

Representation has its price. One does not escape allegory either by edict or by wishing. Myths will have their way, even if – like the neglected witch of Sleeping Beauty – they are not invited. A nude woman in the company of a swan is always Leda, though in one of Pearlstein’s renderings, the fable is made wooden with what might be a shooting gallery target. In another version, now accompanied by a statue of the god Mercury and an accordion, the bestiality becomes comic. In several variants of another ancient story, the sirens are made gigantic by miniature boats.

The thin line between rape and gynecology is drawn in one watercolor study where a butterfly hangs over a nude woman in an examination chair. Such a piece of furniture cannot be an accident of interior decoration; it demands to be recognized for what it is if the incongruity, and the threat, are to take shape. A dirigible, a kiddie car, airplane and two models become a heap of limbs and wreckage; the aftermath of a disaster, with corpses as large as the broken machines.

Superman, Nefertiti, a gargoyle and a horse that could be a plaything from Troy are the debris of Western culture, gazed upon by their naked companion, like Rembrandt’s Aristotle wondering over Homer. The difference is a world like Macbeth’s where “all is but toys,” and what mattered once, no longer does. This records an emptiness with value, and is not simply an abstraction by artist’s edict. Every choice here is charged with loss.

Mickey Mouse and a White House for birds read like a gathering of all our country’s demons, repeated in a canvas where the Walt Disney character performs for an uninterested couple, the painter now as puppeteer, insisting that the models are nothing more than toys themselves, forcing us up against the paradox of knowing that they are not.

The wind blows through these works, with their whirligigs and Chinese kites and sailing ships, the air made visible in inflated chairs and balls. But there is also the weight of metal against flesh, an iron butcher sign with its cleaver and saw and a spear-pointed weathervane that dares us into indifference. This is realism of the magical kind, where the bizarre is always hung about with violence.

This brings us to the sense in which Pearlstein is correct in his disdain for content. It has nothing to do with abstraction, but with the brutality of our looking. An early print of his which I once knew well, had the radical amputations of limbs and head that I thought allowed for a clearer grandeur of form, free of personality. But this recent encounter with his work reminds me that he is more a documentarian of perception. He is simply recording our encounters with each other in the streets, where we are drained of what is human. Weary pornographers that we are, we have all seen too much to care.

by Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Philip Pearlstein: Recent Works, through November 24, 2009

Chauncey Stillman Gallery

Lyme Academy College of Fine Art

84 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT

860-434-5232

www.lymeacademy.edu