Jim Nutt’s current show of paintings and drawings at David Nolan resembles nothing so much as portraits, from observation, of the artist Orlan. I suspect this observation will not be distressing to either of the artists in question. Nutt has been torquing the represented body for a little longer than Orlan has been using representations to torque the actual body. Nutt’s destination is frequently –usually– comic. Orlan’s is hit or miss in this regard. But either way a sense of the embodied self under threat, perhaps open to the comedian’s barb, stalks both bodies of work.

Nutt seems less of an outsider these days. Perhaps it is that the inside has had to come part way to meet him. By which I mean he has his context of which we have all become aware:  Pashke, Spero, Green, Nilson and all those Midwestern Hairy Whoists and imagists. And also because the aforementioned inside has fawned over so many certified “outsiders” in the forty plus years since Nutt et all mounted their insider-outsider shows of rage in Chicago.

I for one hold a fond memory of Nutt’s youthful embrace of impolite imagery culled from vernacular sources. He –they, I suppose, i.e. most of the Chicago imagists– were open to the influence of self taught artists and popular images well before the latter were Pop images. I am not sure that being the first past the post in and of itself should get you the prize.  But with Nutt the prize should be offered because one was compelled to look (or look away) by the crazed vulgarity of weirdly rendered genitals; by the ghastly comic bodies that were at once wounded, often in pieces, often leaking fluids but also brought into being as elaborately textured surfaces of paint.  Often the compartmentalized rectangles, of comic book rote, were there to help us connect the dots of a proto narrative; the Damoclean axe rendered above the central image of  “I’m all a twit” (1969) was just the right clue as to what is going on.

And what was going on? Well, George Grosz without the rise of European fascism as context is one take. The willful havoc of Grosz’s or Dix’s murdered prostitutes and generals echoed throughout Nutt’s work in the sixties and seventies.  Strolling around David Nolan’s sparely hung front room I pined for the above version of Nutt.  The work presented here, dating from 2003 through 2010, is more somber, less flamboyant, less bloody and messy. Without doubt mayhem, albeit in a lesser register, has still been visited upon the figures.  The work here is all portraits of women. A series he has apparently been employed upon since the early 1980’s. The show is dominated –at least numerically– by drawings. Drawings that are extremely precise. Spot on. No second chance in their execution. Nothing erased nothing redrawn. A line is a line, period. But in this –and this is a problem I think– they are also resilient to the sort of pleasure long associated with Nutt’s work. (They are resilient to pleasure in the way only a 9h pencil can be). In the drawing of the hair and the features Nutt evolves what must be a painstaking and labor intensive catalogue of marks. Beautifully fetishized graphite hair amplifying the texture of the paper, sits atop Cubist distortions of noses and ears. Perfectly shaded nipples peek a boo through linear (the 9h pencil) garments. In the end they are very subtle. Arguably too subtle. Subtle was always there in Nutt’s work. It was there in many ways, in craft, in the many layers of text and subtext, in insider jokes and references. But the work always relied on a pretty direct punch line. So Nutt is taking a risk in departing from that stand-up format.

However, the paintings in the current show reach out to the drawings. They offer a helping hand .The paintings deploy a repertoire of beautifully crafted devices within each canvas, and beyond, to the painted frames that allow a seamless drift from image to border and back again. Over the years Nutt has demonstrated his facility to invent paint marks that rend and suture bodies. Here the line of the drawings is almost reprised in the paintings as flat planar areas define cheeks, necks and background territories. And yet the elaborate textures of a dress rendered as an optically dizzying textile, or a nose as busy, colorful and contoured as an orangutan’s butt check the territorial ambitions of the two dimensional surface. She –they, there are three women/characters in the paintings– evoke Frankenstein’s monster (well, probably Elsa Lanchester) cross-bred with Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring. Idealizing portraits quietly, though not smugly, waiting in guileless silence.  These three paintings, also quietly, kin to the anime fancies of hybrid bodies and synthetic figures, offer a robot ophthalmologist’s array of eyes. All of which are the wrong size and all are mismatched as pairs. And all, uncannily, do not follow the viewer around the room.

Nutt’s recent work is less indebted to, or celebratory of, vernacular visual styles than it once was. If you want that in this show you can get it too. The gallery is also showing a group of Nutt’s work from the late 1960’s through the 70’s. This work, sequestered in the back room, allows a perhaps nostalgic moment of profane genuflection to the more raucous Nutt of  before.

David Nolan

527 West 29th Street
New York, NY 10001