The Brooklyn Rail

The spirit of Narcissus haunts the lonely territory of painting, where the canvas is, inevitably, a blank mirror solitary artists fill in with images that emanate from within. Ovid’s Narcissus, personification of mad love, literally consumes himself in self-contemplation, and this is where Spencer Sweeney’s version of narcissism diverges from the classical model: he can reroute that self-absorption, transforming Narcissus’s gaze into a creative quest.

Despite their exuberance, the fourteen works—ten paintings and four drawings—now on view at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery constitute a rather subdued chapter in the work of this animated performing artist, a figure who is typically front and center in the extravaganzas he stages. Self-Portrait in the Wissahickon #2 (2024), for example, uses academic portraiture as a point of departure but locates that cliché in the artist’s biography. The Wissahickon is a park in Philadelphia, Sweeney’s hometown. The figure is posed either like an athlete in repose or like a woman who’s just emerged from the bath—left arm raised, hand on the back of the figure’s head. Now Sweeney innovates: the face is blackened beyond recognition, the only discernible feature the line running from the nose into the left eyebrow. The genital area too is black, as if to render what is nominally a self-portrait anonymous and androgynous. The result recalls Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, both because of the mask-like face and because of that raised arm. The enigmatic layers of autobiography and art history make this drawing ultimately unfathomable.

This aura of mystery extends to the paintings, beginning with one linked directly to the drawings: Self-Portrait on Bed (2024), an oil, charcoal, and acrylic on linen. Here Sweeney poses himself as Manet’s 1863 Olympia but, again, with a significant difference: he faces away from us. A splash of paint obliterates the reclining figure’s head, as if to negate the artist’s gaze, which is focused on the female nude in a painting-within-the-painting. There is also an extremely suggestive phallic line rising from the figure’s groin dissolving in a cartoonish ejaculation. We spectators become voyeurs witnessing a burlesque of the “orgasmic” moment when the artist’s narcissism overflows in the act of creation. The nude Sweeney stares at in the picture on his easel also has a Picasso-like resonance and is almost a Cubist figure, arm behind her back, leg raised, foot, facing away from us. Sweeney-Narcissus has captured the elusive Echo and turned her into art. So, there is a disjointed story here: the artist-narcissist is fascinated by himself but fascinated as well by something he does not have, some missing part of himself.

Like the creatures the gods split in half in Plato’s Symposium, Sweeney is searching for his other half. He finds it—at least metaphorically—in the figure he calls “the Painted Bride” in the title of his show. Her arrival is announced, fittingly, in a William Blake-inspired painting, The Herald of the Coming Good (2024), a large, 73 by 100-inch painting whose title comes from George Gurdjieff’s 1933 book of the same name, which deals with our need to achieve higher levels of self-awareness. The waving swirls surrounding the herald, who looks demonic, resemble Blake’s treatment of swirling watercolor clouds or the figure he calls Albion Rose (1795), while the triangular volcano in yellow and red on the left side of the painting is apocalyptic—after all, the herald must be announcing something. In the end, Sweeney’s herald is angelic, a messenger telling the viewers to look forward to a burgeoning of self-knowledge.

That epiphany appears in The Painted Bride (2024) a huge 89 by 119-inch oil on linen. For a Philadelphia native like Sweeney, the word bride might evoke Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Duchamp’s masterpiece is staged in two registers: below, the bachelors, about to inseminate the bride waiting for them above. Sweeney’s bride is also waiting for something to happen to her, but in a more traditional setting, one derived from representations of the Annunciation: the artist creates a hortus conclusus, the walled garden that traditionally symbolizes Mary’s virginity. Here vivid orange trees enclose his virgin, restoring her to Eden, where she becomes a prelapsarian Eve. She is served by nature in the form of a dancing green figure on the right, while she gazes at a phallic shape that stands in for the serpent come to tempt her. The painting is a tour de force and logically so: it is a hovering moment of anticipation. Sweeney’s Bride, his alter-ego, must fall to achieve full selfhood.