Seth Becker, Poet at Work, 2023. Oil and collage on panel, 9 x 12 inches. Courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan, New York.
Amidst a throng of competing energies in Seth Becker’s exhibition of Lilliputian paintings one comes to the fore: the artist’s sheer painterly ecstasy in creating these works. They are consummate painterly objects wherein the capacities of the paint, its viscosity, the direction and texture of the brushstroke, opacity and transparency, are all carefully considered and accounted for. In Hunter and Hare (all works 2023) the thickness and striations of the heavily applied greeny-brown paint surrounding the bounding hare seems to facilitate the animal’s breathless getaway. In Hawk, an almost calligraphic application of a few marks renders a meditative raptor on a perch in the lower right hand corner: the rest is a wash of white and off-white. Is it a shadow, bird viewed through the mist, or perhaps just the tip of a flagpole? Becker’s deft craft is interwoven with his narrative desires, which establish the artist’s myriad competing ideas, umbrellaed under the exhibition’s title, A Boy’s Head. The cabinet painting genre is a perfect medium for the magical-realist Aesop/Perrault themes with which Becker engages. While a moral to the story may not be forthcoming, there is plenty of enigmatic narrative. Within the realm of fables, the painter has included animals in twenty-six out of thirty paintings (I include batman and a tattoo of a rabbit in this ration), most of which seem to be engaged in some kind of psychological negotiation with the human subjects.
In Watteau’s Skull we have a syzygy of signifiers starting with a half moon presiding over an alert black dog with perked ears and eyes aglow, a reclining nude, concluding with the head and upper torso of a skeleton, resting in a shallow hole. Each seems lost in its own world: the nude looks off to the right, the dog stares straight at the viewer, and the skeleton—if it’s possible—has an expression of mild contentment. The reference to Watteau is telling. Like many of the works in Becker’s exhibition, Watteau’s scenes are often set in arcadia, with luminous lighting, seemingly at a moment when anything is possible. This is the feeling in Painting By Moonlight, A Dog on the Frozen Bank of Lake Erie, and Abandoned Foal. These leafy and eerily-lighted compositions created a posed sensibility reminiscent of the gentle weirdness of Borremans. The resonances with the Belgian painter are further amplified with the two Batman paintings, Caped Crusader, and Batman’s Living Room, which initially struck me as the eponymous “boy” playing dress up, but could just have easily been Batman himself, within the expansive theme of Becker’s title.
Despite the looming subtext of pure fantasy—ironic, erotic, or otherwise—it’s hard to see that Becker doesn’t want to teach some kind of lesson here. The most arresting interactions seem to materialize between a mystical beast and a sympathetic human. In Poet at Work, a rather fearsome fox snarls at a distracted poet at his typewriter, but their shadows, projected above them on the wall behind, presents an equanimous conversation. Conversing with a Fish depicts a woman in a white shirt listening intently to a very intense fish. At other times, the inhabitants of Becker’s menageries desire to talk directly to the viewer, as in Antoine’s Tiger, where a thoughtful feline observes us over a window guard, or The Horse That Spells, where a miraculous equine is beginning to formulate a message that will transform our lives, if only the painter had captured the moment a bit later! Of all the paintings, Weathervane seems to accomplish everything the painter is pursuing. A leaping hare weathervane atop a barn, á la Barry Flanagan, is consumed in a blaze of thickly impastoed yellowish white pigment, while another streak of light arcs across the sky. It’s impossible to tell if it’s a break in the clouds of a bolt of lightning, just as it’s impossible to tell if the weathervane is ablaze, or simply bathed in post-tempest luminescence. Like the ingredients of a boy’s head, or any child’s head for that matter, nothing has as yet been resolved.
By William Corwin
