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REVIEWS LILY LUDLOW
He Kissed Like a Wolf, Spoke Like a Man, 2007,
acrylic, graphite and chalk on canvas,
122 x 122 cm. Courtesy Canada, New York
LILY LU DLOW: The title of Lily Ludlow’s latest show sounds as if it was penned by the Marquis de Sade. It’s a curious phrasing, not least because
EVERY FLINCHING none of Ludlow’s new paintings would appear all that violent, in subject matter at least, which seems, on the face of it, to take
ATOM OF FLESH the composition of portraiture – more group than single – as its focus. Nevertheless, the eroticism of the Sadean allusion is
MUST BE FLAYED present in the languid, wispy line with which Ludlow’s fi gures are drawn, as well as in their confi gurations, which often fi nd some
CANADA, NEW YORK pair of legs in the air (though the scenes are never as overtly
APRIL 6 – MAY 13 sexual as this description might imply).
If there is any violence to these pictures, though, perhaps
it comes with the confl ict staged between painting and drawing,
or more specifi cally, between surface and contour. The ‘fl esh’
of Ludlow’s fi gures, which pictorial conventions would render
through colour and modelling, has been ‘fl ayed’ away, leaving
only the most minimal of ghostly contours. Untitled (a study) (all works 2007) provides an object lesson in this respect, as the reposing fi gure pictured
there is tripled, with its bottom-most iteration appearing wholly schematic. The standard assumption would be to take this more diagrammatic
and loosely sketched-in body as a starting point for the two more detailed members of the group: the painting as a process of a gradual but literal
embodiment. But the logic of Ludlow’s enterprise takes us in the opposite direction. The schematic fi gure is not so much a starting point as it is a
culmination, a terminus; it is the point at which the surface of the canvas, which is heavily worked in places and nearly bare in others, is no longer in
service to the fi gures pictured there.
We fi nd a similarly ghosted and nearly unfi nished fi gure at the centre of the large group in Hill of Dreams, where, in a kind of Arcadian scene,
the play of contour against canvas surface receives its most energetic treatment. Matilda and He Kissed Like a Wolf, Spoke Like a Man, on the other
hand, remain frozen at an intermediate stage, in which the surface of the canvas and the contours of the fi gures appear in a tense equilibrium. Yet it
is with these two paintings that we can begin to discern the hints of a conversation with certain proper names that belong to the larger enterprise of
painting: Matilda opens up a dialogue with that great arbiter of the fl esh, Lucian Freud; while He Kissed Like a Wolf has a few words to say to Picasso’s
sketchbooks of the interwar Minotaur years. These are not instances of Ludlow paying debts to earlier practitioners, which would simply stall the work
at the level of citation. They are rather moments of what appears to be a project – if it is indeed Ludlow’s project – of what we might call conventional
reassessment, with the stakes being the conventions of painting itself. Jonathan T.D. Neil
AARRTRTREEVVIEIEWW one.linone.linfive.linsix.linfive.lintwo.lin
p147-161 Reviews AR Jun07.indd 10 9/5/07 02:29:59
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