TICKLE FIGHT 2021 By Larry Madrigal
Take the images here as a tease. The plan is to have more paintings and words from Larry Madrigal in First this spring.
Here’s the artist’s own gloss on “Tickle Fight”: “I love when the mundanity of a microwave and the grandeur of the Milky Way meet in a painting. The smallest moments are never devoid of intense meaning.” This painter of modern life is alive to the balance between what’s now and forever in beauty. Per Baudelaire, he’s out “to distill the eternal from the transitory” as he limns his papi y mami story. And laughter is his mash.
Madrigal is often the butt of his own humor, though he doesn’t clown himself. An exchange in an interview hints at why he’s able to foreground himself without a hint of self-regard.
What is the phrase that your mother always says to you?
“Portate chido, pero no coqueto”. Spanish for: Be cool, but not conceited/vain.
Madrigal’s attempt to “rehabilitate the genre picture” seems to owe something to neo-mannerist painters of an older generation as well as to certain near contemporaries. Art critic Grant Vetter writes up some of Madrigal’s precursors here. Madrigal himself has cited old masters from Durer to Velasquez to Ingres, along with the Impressionists. Other traditions outside the art world come to mind. I can imagine viewers of a certain age connecting Madrigal’s homey truths with “dirty realism” of American writers like Raymond Carver et al. Yours truly found myself looking back a little further, flashing on a poem by Randall Jarrell as I took in Madrigal’s art.
Well Water
What a girl called “the dailiness of life”
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
“Since you’re up . . .” Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.
I’m reminded just now of a phrase of Vetter’s–“the aesthetics of relief”–which evokes the restorative quality that suffuses Madrigal’s paintings as you drink them in with your eyes.