Lisa Lewis is a new painter with a fierce approach to her art and a demanding pictorial repertiore. This talent and this shrewdness are not disposed to the glamorous superficialities of this past decade's flirtation with the iconography or the stylistic mannerisms of the greater traditions of painting. Her striving for an individual expression within and yet also against the postmodern, historicist idioms is exacting and dedicated obsessively to the continuance of a tradition of painting, rather than to the ironic dismantling of that tradition's supposed "closures". Despite the evident historical allusiveness of her compositions and her oil techniques, Lewis's painting stands opposed to the techniques of collage, montage or "quotation" which determine so much of the work of her postmodern contemporaries.
"Appropriation", transfigured in the last twenty years from a device of quotation into a slick pseudo-style of eclectic "sampling and mixing", can generate short-term but high-profile commercial careers based on scant art historical appreciation, a paralyzing critical rhetoric and an arrogant disregard for disciplined training in any artistic media (preferring - with the legacy of Conceptual art's technocratic euphoria - the automatic, operative routines of information processing technologies). Almost perversely then, in a decade when facile opportunism and ironic detachment from aesthetic value have become the professional criteria for so many new artists, Lisa Lewis has enforced on herself a formidable artistic apprenticeship, a highly private, intense and impulsive correspondence with the painting techniques of her masters.
Apprenticed, so to speak, to an unlikely pantheon comprising notable Delacroixe, Manet, Goya, Matisse amd Thomas Couture - Lisa Lewis is developing a style that appears initially to be shockingly anachronistic and secluded; and what distinguishes her work from the retro stylistics of the post-avant-garde is the struggle for an integral unity - weird as it must be - an renascence of these otherwise diverse techincal traditions (not the ecelectic recitation of details of their forms). A struggle it certainly is, and any prevarication or uncertainty noticed in these paintings is not the signal of a postmodern ghost of scepticism, but the index of an erratic agonay, argument and trial: The Virtues indicates an informed passion which aspires to (again, alarming untimeliness) a "moral" idea of painting. The equivocation which characterises this morality is due to a still unsettled contest between Lewis's classicism (a commitment to the high Academic idealisation of a pictorial technique engaging realism) and her romantic aggression toward such idealisation (an excoriating anger with the placid emblems of classical abstraction). Her painting turns portraiture against the abstraction to produce anew the concreteness of an image, renaturalizing expression in defiance of its academic codification.
Equivocation here does not compromise the moral content of the paintings (this would make them unsuccessful moralizing plaints) so much as the moral idea almost incidental to an unnerving, hermetic drama embodied in the portrait figures. The thematic unity of the series is almost that of bestial metamorphosis, although this bestiality is only a fairy-tale like figuration; one is reminded of the atmosphere in the tales collected by the Grimm brothers, their morbid attention to decay and dissolution (rather than moral clarity of the fable: Aesop or Perrault). Inasmuch as the romantic agony determines her painting, this is the realm of the fantastic; conflating the worlds of the living and the dead, the saved and the damned, unleashing carnivalesque eccentricity without explanatory licence. Here any resemblance with the heraldic figures of, say, the Tarot deck, ceases. The Tarot incites interpretation by its crypto-symbolic structure (a set of tropes or revisions of emblematic material which disguise the proverbial wisdom referred to). Lisa Lewis's figures retain a naturalism (a closed tonal naturalism painted alla prima) which presents the figures with the directness and simplicity that cannot contain a cryptic substructure. Although stylistically quite distinct, they are expressively similar to the sorts of grotesqueries in Gothic iconography, representing human depravities given their apocalyptic form, their true form behind appearance. And like the picture of Dorian Grey in Oscar Wilde's story, whose portrait depicts the obscenity of the man's demonic beauty and youthfulness, the directness of these portraits' naturalism is itself a moral judgement, analogous to the revelation of otherwise hidden human sin as it will appear on Judgement Day. It is cruicial that The Virtues was painted from life.
On the other hand, in contrast to this effrontery, a curious strength of character ironically emerges from these crippled and crippling figures, which sets them apart from caricature and close to a classical academic scheme for portraiture. Survival through corruption or martyrdom, endurance in other works, is The Virtues' melancholic expression of an individuality which the allegorical pretensions of the classical portrait scheme cannot deny. At this intensity of image, its iconicity, the decadent figure is bestowed a strange kind of decorum: not according to social or moral position - the unlit, raw linen backgrounds leace indefinite any presumed allegorical tableau - but according to an illuminating presence of the individual's simple enactment of an obscure moral idea. There is in this nothing like the kind of costume drama which characterises current "neo-classical" exercises in photography or painting, simplistic burlesques of idealism. Instead The Virtues presents a glance - partial, tentative - toward a fearful survival of Ideas and Forms in an age which disowns its inheritance of them.
