The Brooklyn Rail

I often don’t know what to say when people ask me what kind of art I write about, so I generalize, with perhaps excessive honesty, saying “pretty much anything other than painting.” It’s lucky then that Alex Da Corte—whose mid-career survey of paintings from the last ten years at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth—seemingly shares my distaste for the medium: “It sickens me to death,” he’s quoted as saying in the exhibition catalog.

The show nevertheless begins as what appears to be a traditional collection hang of contemporary painting. Works by Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Richard Pettibone, Morris Louis, Richard Hamilton, Vija Celmins, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, and many others are interspersed with what, upon inspection of the wall labels, are revealed to be near facsimiles of these artists’ work created by Da Corte. He copies them, but he also plays: remixing motifs, cropping compositions, and eliminating elements—none of which prevent you from seeing what you expect to be there.

This exhibition is premised largely on the question of what remains legible about identity when the cultural symbols and touchstones that define the presentation of self are stripped away or shuffled. As such it obviates the very medium that defines the works on view in a subversion not just of material terminology but also of the expectations we cling to, creating a productive friction by queering the norm.

The transition from the collection hang of Da Corte’s influences to a true immersion in his world—which is echoed by the exhibition title’s reference to the Jungian journey of self-discovery whereby one emerges from the belly of a whale (a cavity for ghosts and histories) as their true self—is marked by ROY G BIV (2022/2025). Here, painting manifests simultaneously as fine art and occupation. While a video on one side of a large cubic structure pictures Da Corte in the role of four different characters, including Marcel Duchamp, his alter ego Rrose Sélavy, and the Joker, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art among Brâncuși’s white marble sculptures (which he rather subversively paints bright colors), the structure itself is routinely repainted in red, yellow, and blue over the course of the exhibition’s run.

In its original presentation in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, this process was undertaken by Da Corte’s brother who continued the family business of house painting. Regularly employing reverse sign painting (an exacting commercial technique) and all manner of found materials—mostly products and culturally iconic ephemera—Da Corte blurs the rigid parameters of perhaps art’s oldest medium, acknowledging its primary appeal as a flat thing on a wall that bequeaths to the beholder some form of cultural cachet. We are gullible viewers, and what Da Corte highlights more than anything is our lazy desire for the significance of the symbol and what that says about us, rather than the context and contours of the symbol itself.

In the same way a child pastes magazine tear-outs, album covers, movie posters, and other paraphernalia on their bedroom walls in an effort to locate themselves within a sea of content, The Whale is Da Corte’s childhood bedroom tripped out with higher production value. It makes you want to lounge against his puffy paintings of an anvil from Looney Tunes, blue gloves playing a carrot like a flute á la Bugs Bunny, or a smashed Halloween pumpkin from a 1943 cover of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories; sit on the pink, purple, blue, and green stained wood benches that were custom-made to compliment the exhibition; peruse his favorite posters… I mean artworks; and play with toys (such as a stormtrooper cutout, a plastic pumpkin, ceramic cat fishbowl, and vampire fangs) scattered about his shelves (thoughtfully provided by A Time To Kill [2016] and Haymaker [2017]). Just as the teenage Da Corte painted his own bedroom walls with Disney villains, having learned to draw cartoons from his mother, the adult artist Da Corte remixes and re-contextualizes all manner of referents, from pop music to cartoons, movies, books, and cultural phenomena, unveiling alternative ways that they might speak, hold our attention, and conjure an object-oriented animism normally reserved for people and personifications.

As exemplified by his earliest work on view (Andromeda [2012]), Da Corte’s “shampoo paintings” quite literally reflect his penchant for understanding how identities are constructed through a constellation of objects and material habits. He invokes shampoo as an apt example, as its varied scents, such as, he explains, “Island Mist,” allow us to believe we can be transported through space and time to such an idyllic locale and become the kind of eternally-at-ease, undoubtedly beautiful person that must reside there. Da Corte’s early use of such an unnatural, brightly colored liquid as a medium has since served as just one example of the readymade products that he uses to map identity, sexuality, and their respective interpretations across the spectrum of contemporary culture.

While Da Corte instrumentalizes objects (like shampoo) as a mirror in this series of “paintings,” he similarly illuminates an object’s function in the public performance of sexuality in The Failure Factor (2019). By replacing the prism through which light passes to create a rainbow on Pink Floyd’s album cover for The Dark Side of the Moon with signs of heteronormative masculinity as embodied in brand iconography (a Nike swoosh and the Monster energy drink’s logo), Da Corte underscores their function as “mechanisms through which one might become recognizable in the world as, say, a straight man,” Kemi Adeyemi writes in the exhibition catalog. While this is true, I might argue that the transfigured motif also suggests a willful subversion: despite the elimination of the prism, a rainbow nevertheless emanates from these corporate, traditionally masculine-coded symbols, suggesting an inherent, omnipresent queerness—should we choose to see it.

The issue of willful perspective on the part of the viewer is made more apparent in a gallery outfitted with a floor-to-ceiling seventies-inspired mural of curvilinear bands in the colors of Neapolitan ice cream (what flavor is your favorite?), atop which hang over a dozen of Da Corte’s reverse sign paintings. Immaculately framed in different colors, many of these large-format, square, album cover-like multimedia paintings remove the figural subjects of their appropriated source material. Lily Tomlin, for example, is absent from her iconic TIME magazine cover, but her hat, gloved hands, and ornamenting stars remain in The Great Pretender (2021); Mariah Carey’s scantily clad body is evidenced only by the misalignment of the spray-painted rainbow on her eponymous album cover as it passes over her (now phantom) boobs in The End (2017). For those in the know, these references remain known, creating a default community of theoretically like-minded individuals.

Object affiliation may be the easiest way to self-sort, and while the ephemera, tear-outs, knickknacks, and family photos housed within joyously pink, blue, red, and green vinyl-sided display tables alongside the reverse sign paintings may ultimately serve the same function, their apparent accrual over the artist’s lifetime speaks to the individual behind the performance, as well as the desires underpinning the “paintings” that these objects have informed. Against the backdrop of the slick, conceptual play of sociocultural referents and remixes within his “paintings,” the vitrines bring forth a warm nostalgia for the ghosts and histories of Da Corte’s past. Unexpectedly, perhaps, for an exhibition about masking, here there is both an unknowability and an intimacy, one that is not embodied by the stuff and the images so much as by the act of their collection and the care with which they have been carried forth in time.

It is through this joyous embrace of the stuff that makes up our lives, and a deviant, childlike proclivity for questioning the narratives that inform our worldviews, that Da Corte mounts an investigation of identity’s varied forms—and capitalism’s hold on our sense of self via the products we buy, the jobs we perform, and even the ways in which pleasure and joy are commodified.