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Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels
at National Portrait Gallery, London, through 5 January 2020
Reviewed by Christopher P Jones
In her new solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, New York artist Elizabeth Peyton offers a procession of glistening vignettes, portraits of famous and not-so-famous faces, whose cool freshness leaves the visitor with an excited, if slightly outmoded sense of pursuit. Many of her male subjects carry a melancholy, morning-after expression that signals an unabashed adoption of the female gaze. Peyton has painted Kurt Cobain and David Bowie, David Hockney and scenes from the Twilight films, as well as personal friends and lovers. Her eye tends towards the sheen of beauty, where cheekbones are elevated and noses are streamlined.
If the trend in contemporary art is towards the bold and brazen, then Peyton is an outlier, since every pallid-cheeked portrait here has the diminutive quality of a book cover. Her painting style has an intentional simplicity, even crudeness, where the paint is diluted and the brush marks are fragmentary. For a painter in oils her colours sit close to the surface. Her flat brushwork lends many of her sitters an androgynous ambiguity. Nobody smiles; everybody has pursed lips and Pre-Raphaelite stares; the sort of far-away lassitude that fashion photography excels in.
