Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat light up the cavernous Gagosian Gallery on far West 25th Street like a carnival. At each turn they offer up big noisy characters and splashes of crayon-box color and snatches of street slang. Basquiat, like Warhol, is a brilliant graphic designer, and paints to charge each square inch of surface with a bristling kinetic energy. It’s as if every figure, phrase and mark we see could burst forward at any moment, but has been pinned in place with scientific precision. These canvases are full but aren’t overwrought. In Italian is packed with all sorts of things (faces, quotes, splotches, scribbles, two quarters, one gorilla) and yet remains remarkably poised, with swatches of primer and raw canvas showing through, giving the scene, below its lush, funky texture, space and depth.
Seeing these paintings expunges Basquiat’s personal mythology of a boy genius dying young. These are substantial works that stir up recollections of Jackson Pollock (in their deep swirling motions) and Willem De Kooning (in their scary, funny monsters). They also, seemingly effortlessly, capture rhythms of cartoon art, graffiti, advertising, and video games. Two paintings here stand out for their brute, experimental simplicity. Each of these was shaped by stretching canvas over a wood pallet, overpainting it in a single color, and embellishing it with a single face and name. One, red, commemorates Jersey Joe Walcott and the other, black, commemorates Sugar Ray Robinson. These two pieces have an unique sculptural charisma that sets them apart from the other canvases. They’re more powerful as talismans than as paintings, and start to chart a different course. It’s hard not to wonder what more Basquiat would have done if he had lived. There is in these canvases an iconography not yet fully developed.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983.
Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery
© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013.