anime meets helmut newton – the cripple sexy psycho. i was never a big fan of john currin, i liked some of his pieces on a purely aesthetic level, but i never got what the work was about and i suppose it didn’t effect me enough to ever bothered to find out. as a decorative piece they can be nice, i mean they will surely match someones couch, some where. but as a whole they seemed stupid and frivolous. the one element that captured my attention for a few days at the start was the fact that he was painting rather traditional subjects/portraits in oil on canvas in a time like this? meaning now! it seemed so lame and out of touch, but then again I liked his retaliation towards the scene. the fad, the press, the marc jacobs obsession, etc made him the bad boy or the hot boy and one couldn’t get away from him. after a series of portraits of his wife, Rachel Feinstein, he moved on to graphic sex scenes of people I could not recognize. made me yawn to be honest! flash to years later, the other night I had dinner with sabrina buell from matthew marks gallery in new york and over the course of our dinner she said something that i liked. she said “currins work was quite so about our time, the excess and the gaudiness… the women in his work didn’t just have breasts they had gaigantic breasts, it was about excess…” ok thats not bad, how could i have missed it. sure enough there are plenty of that in his work but i still dont see the thread through the work. i’m still not convinced of his work but it was a point to consider. by dd