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J Louis, “Vision in Pinks”

 

On a recent visit to Charleston, S.C., while walking to the Gibbes Art Museum to attend a family wedding celebration, I stopped in at the neighboring Principle Gallery. There, I discovered the remarkably skillful paintings of J Louis, who is only 32. He is a highly gifted painter and draftsman (i.e., he can draw really well), who was trained at SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. The Principle Gallery is featuring his work this month following the opening of his show on November 1.

J Louis clearly has a fascination with women and the many forms of a woman’s beauty. Yet, unlike the work of various other artists who share his interest in the female form, nudes seem to be rare among Louis’ works. He has the eye of a fashion photographer, though one with a paradoxically greater interest in the faces and hands of his models than he does in their clothing.

Indeed, the vesture worn by his various models is usually rendered in flat swathes of paint, sometimes muted and sometimes vibrant with color. Louis’ way of portraying that clothing tends to diminish its representational significance, so that it functions somewhat like the background of his paintings. By taking this approach, the artist has the opportunity to further explore and express his regard for other visual aspects of the women who have posed for him.

J Louis at work on a commissioned painting

All of the paintings in the current show feature his characteristic images of elegantly beautiful women, with some of the paintings playful, others mysterious, and many alluring in their sensual presentation of eyes, faces, and hands. As a result, he portrays these women as being more than attractive models, and as people who in some way he has come to know as real persons who have distinct personalities. His depiction of his models therefore includes, but also transcends, careful attention to their appearance, with his skill in displaying an apparent sensitivity to and respect for these women’s character and temperament.

I was struck right away by two aspects of many of Louis’ paintings: his gift for capturing facial expression and the wonder of human eyes, along with his ability to render the power of a gaze; and his adeptness in producing abstract color fields of great beauty. These are two features not generally found together, in my experience. Several of Louis’ paintings bring to mind an unexpected fusion, such as we might find between – for example – Gerhard Richter’s early photo-realist images, and Richter’s more recent abstract paintings. For these reasons, the following image by Louis, titled “Flag,” stood out to me in particular.

More specifically, a number of Louis’ paintings appear to be the result of a merging between two highly differing approaches to painting, on one hand an abstract expressionist’s use of the process of squeegee spreading and melding paint colors, and on the other, the highly refined representative work of a painter whose images rival those produced by an art-oriented photographer.

This juxtaposition of differing approaches to visual compostion, figurative representation, as well as color field and pattern exploration, reminds me of some of the paintings of Gustav Klimt, as if he had been painting in the 1950’s. Several of the various qualities that I have highlighted here, and found in Louis’ paintings, may be discerned in the images of Louis’ paintings shown below.

Sensitive depiction of the human face, dramatic pictorial composition, an eye for vibrant color, and a pattern of setting in tension images of three dimensional figures side by side with visually flat fields of contrasting paint, distinguish J Louis’s large and, in my view, highly successful paintings.

The artist in his New York studio (below)