OnExhibit A painter shows his many faces by Michael O’Sullivan There are only eight portraits by Jeff
Huntington on view in the Annapolis painter’s latest exhibition at Reyes and Da- vis gallery. There are, however, 21 faces. Ex- quisitely rendered from photographs, each work represents multiple views of a single subject. Huntington’s sitters are, for the most part, his family: the 39-year-old art- ist’s father, his young nieces and nephews, and the children of friends. A few of the artworks are ordinary triptychs: three can- vases hanging side by side, reflecting three faces and three moods. Most of the works in the show, however,
have a bit more going on. “Double,” for example, depicts a girl with
two heads sprouting from a single neck. So does “Reflex,” a single canvas that shows the same child with two faces looking in opposite directions, like the Roman god Ja- nus. The one on the right is laughing; an- other, pokerfaced, looks left. The girl in “Dazzle” is completely normal, except for her four eyes. At first glance, it looks like a mistake in printing registration, as if two color newspaper plates had slipped on the presses, leaving an extra pair of peepers. “Snip and Tuck” and “Rift” are even more unsettling. The girl in the former pic- ture has five eyes, three noses and three mouths. The one in the latter has the requi- site number of organs, but they’re all out of alignment. One eye is higher than another; the mouth is split down the middle, like a cleft lip. Her nostrils don’t line up. Like Marcel Duchamp’s infamous “Nude Descending a Staircase,” these are time- based works, showing movement and change, often within a single frame. They have more in common with film than with photography. How can you capture any one person’s essence in a single image, they ask, when the face is so changeable, when every moment so fleeting? But they also ask another, more trou- bling question: What is the nature of per- ception itself? Perhaps it isn’t merely our faces that change, from one moment to the
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IMAGES FROM REYES AND DAVIS
Jeff Huntington depicts movement in the unsettling portrait “Snip and Tuck,” part of his show “Plaques and Tangles” at the Reyes and Davis gallery.
next, but the eyes — the mind’s eyes — that we see each other with. Titled “Plaques and Tangles” — a refer- ence to the telltale jumble of proteins that build up on the neurons of the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease — Hun- tington’s show is less about how we’re seen than how we’re remembered. It’s about appearances, to be sure: those
evanescent expressions that we hold onto in photo albums, and our own memories. Huntington captures them perfectly, ren- dered faces with a virtuosic brush. But deep down, his art isn’t about virtuosity or perfection. It’s about the limits and the failings of consciousness.
osullivanm@washpost.com
Two heads come from seemingly one neck in “Double,” top, while “Rift,” above, shows a girl’s face out of alignment.
JEFF HUNTINGTON: PLAQUES AND TANGLES
Through July 10 at Reyes and Davis, 923 F St. NW, Suite 302. 202-255-5050.
www.reyesdavis.com
Hours: Open Wednesday-Friday 1 to 6 p.m.; Saturdays 1 to 5 p.m. Admission: Free.
THE STORY BEHIND THE WORK Jeff Huntington’s interest in Alzheimer’s FROM REYES AND DAVIS Three works capture various moods of Jeff Huntington’s father, an Alzheimer’s patient.
isn’t idle curiosity. The artist’s father, depicted in “Plaques and Tangles”— a triptych from which the show takes its name — has suffered from the disease for 10 years. The three-canvas work depicts the 67-year-old in moods that are, by turns, frustrated, goofy and contemplative. Those three paintings began as an homage to his father. He was also an artist, and Huntington remembers accompanying him, as an 8-year-old boy, to art classes. It’s there that Huntington first discovered his facility for portraiture, painting characters from “Star Wars.” When Huntington began “Plaques and
Tangles,” he didn’t know where they would lead. Like all his work, they started out as black-and-white, or grisaille (from the French word for “gray”) underpaintings. Color is only added as a final step. After starting them, Huntington put the
pictures of his father aside and began to work on images of children, most of whom are his father’s grandchildren. It was then that Huntington noticed how multiple perspectives were also creeping into those works. Eventually, he returned to his father. The three pictures, he says, were “the first ones started and the last ones finished.”
— Michael O’Sullivan
THE WASHINGTON POST • FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 2010
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