TODD BIENVENU
Through May 14. yours mine & ours, 54 Eldridge Street, Manhattan; 646-912-9970, yoursmineandoursgallery.com.
Todd Bienvenu paints both oil and acrylic in a faux-naïf style of broad approximate strokes, bright high-contrast colors and heavy impasto. Like his technique, his subjects — including, in the current show, big feet, rear ends and a plastic bag blown against a chain-link fence — take full account of the cheap disposability of figurative images in the internet age. But there’s a lot more underneath them.
There’s painterly skill, as in the New York skyline in “Room With a View,” a perfectly pitched riff on dentist-office photo-realism with soupy, children’s-book clouds. There’s the display of self-consciousness every good painting needs these days. See “Watersports,” which shows 20 figures cavorting in and around a squarish swimming pool, with its color wheel for a beach ball, its double entendre for a title, and its reference to Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa.”
Most important, there’s a love of paint in itself so clear and contagious that it almost makes all the figuration look like a pretext. Examine the naked back in “Room With a View,” dashed off in a patchwork of brown, pink and brick-red; the squiggly water in “Watersports”; or “Thank You,” a portrait of a plastic shopping bag whose layers of crisscrossing strokes have the methodical space-covering glee of papier-mâché.
