Jeff Gillette is to the decrepit ambiguity of third-world Shantytowns
what Cézanne was to the brooding profile of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Both
found in their source material something so central to their psychology
as to provide them an idiosyncratic lifetime of sustenance—in Gillette’s
case, a lifetime so far!—in images of seemingly endless malleability
and variegation. For Gillette, these dense warrens of closely packed
shacks cobbled together from found pieces of metal and wood—a true
collage architecture—that often appear in the poorest neighborhoods
of tropical cities are mesmerizing and teeming with an energy that
seems to crackle. This energy creates a kind of confetti of horizontals
and verticals that, particularly in a work such as Caracas/Tree Park 2
(2012), seems to proliferate in a cellular, organic manner. People are
never present in Gillette’s work (or, for that matter, in Cézanne’s MSV
images), and there’s little interest in narrative or in some kind of social
commentary here; it’s more of a beehive effect, the sense that life
courses through these places. Gillette’s palette is somewhat upbeat,
and he sprinkles these pretty much realist works with little allusions to
Disneyana or to some high art images making their way to these
shacks. The slums are extremely interesting visually, and as presented
are not without allure; rather, it is the allusions to Mickey or Daisy or
Murakami’s Mr. DOB that end up evoking a morose feeling, a sense
that something is askew, out of place. But on the whole there is a kind
of chastened nobility to how Gillette perceives these places, which
in reality must be hellish. Like Gauguin sometimes representing the
Polynesia of his dreams, no matter what his eyes told him as he looked
about, here too the inclination is not to judge, but to enhance certain
visual elements that end up driving Gillette’s image far more than its
narrative or social content does.
Gillette shared the exhibition with some intriguing urban scenes by
Carl Ramsey, and the two artists indicate that the cityscape is nowhere
near exhausted as a wistful and complex metaphor for the people
who live within them, and that place has not been homogenized
into irrelevance.