There’s a feature in this month’s Vogue about Rodarte, the fashion house led by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy. They make singular, ephemeral garments that look as if they could be ripped off a girl by a good gust of wind. The ones I’ve seen in person don’t seem tailored so much as assembled: from strips of leather, twists of fabric, feathers, baubles and trim. And they don’t seem to be fitted to a woman’s body so much as wrapped around it and pinned in place. (What does it feel like to wear one these dresses?) The article praises the designers for their unusually artistic perspective and for building a thriving business in Los Angeles, at a distance from the media frenzy of New York.

Their current collection looks to Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings for inspiration. In its palette of shimmering, impossible-to-name golds, greens and blues, it’s faithful to the artist’s blooms and skies. The dresses are all immaculately, inventively cut, and stunningly pretty. And maybe that’s why I can’t, like the editors at Vogue, simply fall in love with the clothes. They go down easy. They don’t get at the crazy life in Van Gogh’s canvases; they simply adopt their colors and images. Some dresses literally reuse parts of the canvases (sunflowers, a night sky) as prints. The most successful outfits mix solid-colored pieces with evocative silhouettes to capture some of the graphic dynamism of the paintings. But no garment gets at their raw physicality or emotionalism. They’re drowned out in loveliness.

Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings, on view now simultaneously at the eleven Gagosian galleries world-wide, are inane and pleasure-giving. Hirst painted them from 1986 to 2011, in different sizes and scales, applying these basic rules: each canvas has a white background, each spot in a canvas is a different color, and each spot is almost always spaced one diameter away from the next. In discussion and in reproduction the paintings are terribly banal but in person they have a fizzy charisma. My favorite of all the ones in the three New York City galleries is a six-foot-tall square canvas with four-inch-diameter spots at the 24th Street gallery. The proportions make for a special dynamism. But the installation at the 21st Street gallery is spectacular. Here the enormous single space is given over to the paintings. They’re at crazily different scales, from tablet-sized canvases with millimeter-wide dots to TV-sized ones with single dots. The gallery feels like a giant candy shop.

It’s easy to say that the work, and the Gagosian’s around-the-world installation, are gimmicks. But the Spot Paintings are all about painting. The fields are a dry, flat white and the the hand-stenciled spots are a luscious gloss, with the ones at the perimeter kissing the edge of the stretched surface of the canvas. Conventional painterly subjects – depth, figuration, technique – have been brilliantly excised so that’s all that’s left is paint and canvas. The format is so formulaic that even graphics and composition seem irrelevant. When you look at a painting for more than one moment your eyes scan for figures, semi-automatically linking similar-colored spots that might make a larger shape. But the spots are random and no figure emerges. Your eye flickers excitedly from one color to the next (from almost-cupric-blues, to almost-crayon-reds, to almost chocolate-browns) with no success. And then the eye settles, finally, on the figure of the white field. Because this is the real subject of the paintings, and of painting. Each one is an ecstatic field of possibility.

Image credit:

Photography Prudence Cuming Associates