Jenny Poetzel: Self-Portraits
Many of us go through a period of mirror gazing in adolescence, of wondering who we are and what we’ll become, perhaps incited by a changing appearance at once familiar and strange. So it’s no surprise when art students and recent art school graduates focus on self-portraits. Ten paintings and drawings at the Contemporary Art Workshop by Jenny Poetzel, who received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2001, don’t bring anything conceptually new to the genre but combine humor with a technique that makes vivid the instability of the young self, a notion also embodied in the myth of Narcissus.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
While Self-Portrait is unified partly by its palette of browns, Self-Portrait (After Manet) includes more diverse colors, held together in a dynamic tension that reflects two of Poetzel’s early influences, Richard Diebenkorn and Henri Matisse. Using Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere as a model, Poetzel stands with her hands on a long table before a mirror, like the woman in the Manet but without
Narcissus, based on the Caravaggio painting of the same name, replaces his pool of water with a round mirror. The curves of Poetzel’s hair, shoulders, and legs echo the shape of the mirror she grasps, creating a spiraling vertigolike effect, as if the mirror were a whirlpool beckoning the figure toward oblivion. Here the trap of narcissism becomes evident: regarding the self looking at the self to the exclusion of all else negates the rest of the world and leads to inner emptiness.
That theme is also evident in Molina’s smaller single-panel works. Arboles (“Trees”) depicts two photos of a single tree hung side by side. The trees look identical–or are there small differences between them due to imperfections in the “photos” or to variations in Molina’s painting? Horizontal brush marks make clear that these are paintings but are so heavy as to also suggest streaks in photos. Can we distinguish variations in nature from variations in our perceptions or representations of it? Molina expands the idea of entrapment in the self to the notion that our image-saturated culture entraps us. In Beso II (“Kiss II”) a nude couple embracing is surrounded by three photos of trees positioned like three sides of a box. Here the traditional bucolic background for paintings of lovers becomes repeated black-and-white images of what may be the same tree, as if nature had one lone survivor visible only in a photo.
