Welcome to The Big Picture, where CULTURED’s critics zoom out for a wider view of the art world. While the main focus of The Critics’ Table will be reviews, this space is reserved for longer reflections—treatises, prognostications, diaries, and meanderings. Really, anything goes. For the inaugural installment, Co-Chief Art Critic Johanna Fateman waded into the back-to-school furor of early September in New York, when the galleries open for the fall, and emerged with this report.
At P·P·O·W, Robin F. Williams’s paintings, which balance camp horror with art-historical gravitas, and old-school scopophilia with notes of revenge porn, provide a darker variety of visual confection. The larger, meticulously rendered oil works here recall Tamara de Lempicka’s moody Art Deco treatments of the female form, especially in Good Mourning, 2024 (whose figure borrows its pose from Angelica Huston in Annie Leibovitz’s 1985 portrait of the actor). In a wall of faster, gouache-on-paper pieces for which Williams’s lifts imagery from films as varied as When Harry Met Sally and Suspiria, you see the artist’s range. My favorite here is I Spit on Your Grave 2, 2022: The foregrounded black rotary phone that the stringy-haired protagonist stares into is both lifeline and stygian void.