Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: Sex Education at Canisius College
Next story: David Felder

Tawdry Love Affairs and Outright Lust

End of October/Beginning of November (oil on unstretched canvas), a painting from Felix's Second Look/Connections exhibit.

The arresting paintings of Jackie Felix tell the stories we do not tell. These are images that capture unthinkables and leave worlds to be discovered, experimented with and understood. Borrowing image fragmentation methods from graphic novels and the subjects from film noir, these paintings are surprising in their ability to jostle your comfort zone.

Second Look/Connections is an exhibit of paintings that the established Buffalo painter Jackie Felix made between the 1980s and 2006. Some of the works have been shown previously at Anderson Gallery and Big Orbit, but in this new arrangement, new tales are told. The works draw clear connections in subject matter throughout the 20 years in which the paintings were made. Clearly, Felix has lived in this zone of experimentation and hearty sexuality long enough to make it her own. The paintings tell us this, over and over again. Where we don’t see women in lingerie, we have interactions among subjects that suggest infidelity, tawdry love affairs and outright lust. Not that the paintings are all that graphic—as in obvious or X-rated—save a few. They are exceptional, however, in their ability to make suggestions.

Jackie Felix’s ability with the brush is exceptional, too. While she often paints her subjects into flat fields of color—deep red, dark purple or dirty white—the figures are solidly real in their description. Most often painted in loose black lines, the figures, with the adept weight of line, are strong and direct in their presence. Many of the drawings are adjusted by Felix and redrawn, lending a feeling of movement. She describes the people down to their facial expressions, revealing passion, confusion and anger.

Felix has a dry sense of humor, and the titles give that away. So Much Tenderness has two men on either side of the canvas, each aiming a gun, looming over a woman lying on the bed. Spring Pictures Series/#1 sounds like it might be a bucolic landscape, but instead a lovers’ triangle is described. Another painting with two women in lingerie and a man half cropped out of the picture, except for his genitals, is titled Biology 101.

Animals are integrated as well, not just in the portrayal of a Playboy Bunny, but with a chicken laying an egg, and a toy dog sitting in a chair in Totally Ass Backwards.

These paintings expose jealousy, desire, love, fear and disgust—the rawest of emotions that one wrestles through in order to secure real passion. The large paintings, often eight to 10 feet across, are like an open door into your unspoken dreams. Felix deftly allows you, the viewer, to complete the stories, to make them your own fears or fantasies. In that she makes us, the viewers, accessories to the crimes she paints. Players in the crimes of passion. She is teasing us, opening the door to our truths, inviting us in.

Second Look/Connections continues at Buffalo Arts Studio through May 20. Felix keeps her painting studio year round in the Tri-Main Building.