Flitting between trite sentimentalism of Japanese romantic stylings and outright greatness, or between early Laura Owens and Peter Doig visual-static, the work’s defiling of painting’s spatial logic, a breakdown of “arrangement,” common to many afflicted with “outsider” status, gives them an uneasy presence, a space where things do not sit well, sway in sort a of visual seasickness.
Not meaning to idealize the dead into glory, some of the paintings are bad, but the plates, and porcelain at night with black ghosts and odd fox, and alizarin-aura books, and black dogs in rotted fields like van Gogh in crude oil, in their odd flighty directness are a language, like children’s drawings, that obey some methodology that is it’s own and impossible to reproduce. A “unfinished-too-soon” pleasure.
But with “outsider” artists we immediately believe it, that there is no gimmick or meta-gamesmanship, but believe that these are perfectly honest, earnest, miraculous paintings, as if untouched by human crappiness, whether or not its true and which we can’t know, and probably less to do with Ann Craven and more to do with James Ensor.