In a soon-to-close exhibition, West Coast painter Cate White's punkish energy underlies surprisingly sympathetic portraits of dudes on display.
In April of 1972, the long-circulating magazine Cosmopolitan featured a centerfold of nude movie star Burt Reynolds, a bold first in displaying male nudity for a mainstream American magazine. Intended partially to push the envelope in strategic marketing, the gesture also served as a kind of gendered cultural pushback to undisguised sexuality in popular media that fixated on exposed female bodies as objects. If Playboy Magazine generated patriarchal notions of heteronormative lust, the move by Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown turned the gaze around and objectified men's bodies, an act that put up for debate what constituted acceptable modes of desire in the late 20th Century.
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Flash forward to an exhibition of recent paintings that both channels that '70s vibe of viewing of male bodies while also dodging simple objectification. Cate White's show "Men" at Small Works Projects in San Francisco is a lot smarter, funnier and more poignant than the old centerfold. It's also more open-ended in possible takeaways than the publicity stunt a naked Burt Reynolds ended up being.
For one thing, White's polymorphous style revels in rough, often even unfinished, qualities within dazzling crazy quilts of formal choices. What might, at a casual glance, seem some disregard for "completion" communicates White's punkish energy. Upon closer examination, however, the compositions reveal themselves as products of a highly refined and always active intelligence seeking to make connections for all involved -- viewers and subjects, as well as the artist herself -- through a sustained, considered and virtuosic array of striking techniques. Though less publicly heralded to date, White's far-flung depictions of humanity rival the diverse, sometimes cartoony or impressionistic work of more celebrated contemporary artists such as Nicole Eisenman, Bendix Harms and Christina Quarles.
White's paintings of male bodies posed for would-be lusty consumption (nearly all taken from vintage snapshots) range far from any single ideal body type or any ideal at all. Consider, for example, Miguel (robe man) and Mike (bald man). Neither subject's dad-bod chunkiness inhibits them from playing up to the viewer's eye. Miguel sprawls on a bed with an open bathrobe, exposing much of his chest and round belly. Mike, standing in front of a modest-looking twin bed, trucker cap squarely mashed down over his pate, spreads his arms wide, the better to exhibit his t-shirt that reads: "It's not a BALD spot, it's a SOLAR panel for a SEX MACHINE."
Rather than making these portraits into a parade of grotesqueries, White's sympathetic appreciation of each subject's humanity returns the direct gaze of the subjects themselves while maintaining human connection. She portrays them in a light that, though not exactly flattering, remains open to befriending while also treating them as worthy of respect. These are working-class bodies, caught up in moments of pleasure, leisure and showing off. Unlike the culturally celebrated, well-lit, and airbrushed bodies in Cosmo and Playboy, the figures in White's portraits are mostly doing the best with what they've got -- laid out on humble bedspreads in small domestic spaces, holding low-cost party drinks and sporting low-fashion, mass-produced clothing. And White's ensemble of formal moves -- deliberate sketchiness in rendering discrete portions of the images, sprays of carefully applied mica and glitter, drips and flares of paint, textual tags boldly superimposed on painting surfaces and cheap collage elements (photos and other objects from mass-produced goods) -- all combine as provocative emulation of the rough-and-ready lives embodied in her characters' figures and attitudes.
Further complicating "Men" is the fact that many of the male figures in the exhibit are not so definitively masculine. Take, for instance, her medium-scale portrait of Ricky (tub man). Ricky's long shag, prominent cheekbones, dangling skull earrings and thin-framed body -- half-exposed as he lays back in the bath with a bottle of beer -- suggests 1980s hair-metal band androgyny while leaning heavily toward the feminine end of the spectrum (and not too far from the look of the artist herself).
Across the room from Ricky (tub man), the large-scale Nature Man lays out the manly enough reclining title character in a trippy landscape but imbues him with pink man-breasts above six smaller pink markers of what might be "cut" abdominal muscles. These are two of only a handful of quasi-realistic bodily details portrayed -- including sculpted-looking waves of hair and mustache. They nonetheless give a sense of a full portrait while putting those specific parts into high relief, even as they imply a kind of gender ambiguity.
This ambitious male odalisque demonstrates the versatility of White's formal interventions in painting-as-usual. Just one example is her deliberately sketchy depiction of the subject's body, to the point of only cursorily indicating the edges of forms with simple black lines and parallel bands of pink. In another moment of owning the tricks and limits of using pigment to make images mimicking nature, White applies a set of reversed stenciled letters in black, spelling out the word "NATURE" itself, floating in a vertical column to one side of the main image of a sketched body. In parallel, she deftly conjures abstract swirls of color to evoke the environment the man in Nature Man reclines within. These are a divergent set of techniques -- e.g., mere sketches and outlines, or simply a word naming an object or concept -- to indicate things rather than attempting to smoothly create some illusion of realism. As an ensemble, they add up to more than the sum of their individual parts by calling out a varied but focused project in the representation of things and ideas.
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Among the wealth of details richly pointing in further meaningful directions is a crocheted macrame drafted into Nature Man as a marker of '70s-era craft decor and playing the role of the sun in the composition, riffing off the macrame's round shape and vaguely golden-brown colors. This causes viewers to think twice -- both about the era of the image's origins and, at the same time, about the make-believe of painting as a two-dimensional representation of the greater dimensionality of living forms moving through space and time. Echoing this three-dimensional object forcefully pressed into service as a two-dimensional shape -- itself a sign of the three-dimensional object that is the sun -- White affixes a handful of plastic appliqué flowers near the bottom of the painting to fill out signs of nature. Such touches mess with any smoothly readable surface of paint applied to canvas and remind viewers that all marks on the surface of any artwork are indications of the mental images humans produce in perceiving both socially generated ideas and elements in their physical environment.
Above the horizon line on Nature Man's canvas, darker-tinged arcs suggest the nearby presence of the cosmos as a direct view of outer space. Meanwhile, a richer multi-hued background -- meadow garden or lily pond -- behind and underneath the human figure seeps through his outlines. This environmental background seems to fill out the volume of his corporeal being, as if he was both floating on and made up of the elements, an effective means of asserting that humans are interconnected with all things.
Smaller hints of this shared cosmic reality surge and flare up in any number of odd moments in other images: a yellow corona limning the head of the bald guy, a yellow emblazoned chest in Troy (fish) and a yellow glow inexplicably circling the shoulder of Nature Man. These flares of color -- usually pink or yellow -- seem to express an animating force shared across physical and supernatural realms, beyond and through living beings.
Though the show's subject is, as declared, clearly "Men," there are several other non-human presences. These include more than one fish (a fresh catch hanging with dead weight from the hands of the surly fisherman in Troy (fish)) and more than one collage-like animal element (a tiny photographic deer image floating in the background of Doug (cats)). The collaged elements jar the viewer like exegetic music in a film, momentarily reminding us of the artifice behind the media they're immersed in. There are more obvious pets, like the blue parakeet on the head of Ron (bird man), but cats dominate, not only in their quantity of appearances but in the layers of affect and the qualities they embody across different paintings.
In many ways, cats are avatars for other emotions underlying those expressed on the human figures' faces. Most of the cats look less than pleased. The one exception is the tortoiseshell sprawled alongside the bedded figure of Miguel. The cat in Ricky (tub man) acts as fierce guardian on the front rim of the bath occupied by a particularly swozzled and chill-looking human. But this cat also represents a more potent underlying emotional state in reaction to our voyeuristic gaze, occupying as big and central a location in the composition as his human counterpart.
That cat also stands in for the unseen crotch area of their human, and this is not the only image where a prominent pussy not only covers but represents a sort of deliberately gender-blurring counterpart. This play on a marker for "female" doesn't sit as some loving (or otherwise) antithesis to males whose genitals they mask but arguably as a set of "female" attributes that aren't simply desired by the central male human figures but also at least latently coexistent within those figures. These combined forces hint at a compositing of binary ideas of gender.
Beyond the teasing at sexual attitudes and displays, complicated ideas of class and race percolate. l-r Darren, Tyrone, Marcus, Andre, Stevie, Daryl, James (group shot) shows seven men posed in front of a courtyard swimming pool, signaling intimations of racial coexistence as six black men flank the one white member of the cohort. A disorienting perspective where the lip of the swimming pool seems to hover above ground level and cuts off all the standing figures mid-leg makes for a strange, half-tethered relationship between them and the ground. Though these partiers clutch alcoholic drinks and present smiling faces, that visual kneecapping is part of a darker shadow hovering over the gathering. An ominous Pool Rules sign blares "NO" over and over again on the wall behind the group, indicating possible social injunctions that will make their cohesion unlikely to hold.
Frequently depicted bearing markers of indulgence and addiction (beer, cigarettes, a t-shirt emblazoned with "Enjoy Cocaine"), the human subjects in "Men" recall scenes from the 1970s, when drug use crept out from a surging counterculture. At the same time, 1960s notions of "free love" became more mainstream, with increasing pornographic suggestions in American society (witness nude Burt and the nothing that came between young Brooke Shields and her Calvin Kleins). Beyond determined decadence, "Men" points to free love's runoff from and its feints to cross-gender equality, at least as far as ideas of equality trickled down to and were embraced by varied levels of class. White's work is indeed worthy of attention in how such ideas might be diffused throughout contemporary society -- if still controversially so -- but as much because of the insightful, extraordinarily dynamic and empathetic good humor with which White renders a complex matrix of human relationships via a highly entertaining set of paintings.
"Men" at Small Works Projects in San Francisco runs through March 4, 2025.