Sex goes click-clack like a Japanese Transformer toy and stomps over everybody's peace of mind, not to mention each morning's front pages. If you think that our society's burgeoning sexual angst isn't about you, too, you may have gone and had yourself presciently neutered. Yuskavage, Currin and their peers promote the wild wisdom that we must, finally and again, deal seriously with the bottomless givens of our nature. Moralistic and legalistic reductions of human motives have attained absurdity. Now we need credible public languages for raw private truths, at once untopical and very specific.
Painting can square public with private experience like no other visual medium.
Its main demands on an artist, in this pursuit, are only that he or she be, first, adequately skilled and, second, a sufficiently interesting person. We need to believe that every mark on the canvas is a decided, completed deed of hand and mind, capturing a vision and a sensibility and not just waving at them. If we feel that anything about the painting could reasonably have been done better or even differently, the game's over. This is all to the artistic good if we are confident that the painter knows exactly what we are looking at. The repulsive element then becomes the precise hint that, hardest to take, must be taken.