Contending with a long history of painting as a medium strictly made for the disembodied eye, Joey Fauerso’s exhibition “Bedroom Paintings” at David Shelton Gallery makes her painted canvases into bedding and displays them while in use by various living bodies. Primarily presented in a four-channel video, Fauerso expands on her long-standing engagement with art and the body. In the 23-minute 44-second video, titled Bedroom Paintings, a top-down view of a bed shows friends and family of the artist in various states of “sleeping, thrashing, and dreaming.” These subjects lie within pillows, duvets, and sheets all made of Fauerso’s paintings, and as they move that material about, the viewer’s ability to see each piece with clarity is continuously (partially) denied. Part a straightforward collision of living bodies — those present in the video — with representations of bodies — those depicted in the paintings — the video offers a riposte to opticality in which she does not so much deny vision but rather doubles, abstracts, and contorts it.
A work by Joey Fauerso
Adjacent to the video hang six prints, each containing roughly fifteen pieces of the painted bedding present in the video. Here in miniature form, one can parse the collection of imagery. One pillow/canvas shown within a print is labeled, “After ‘Marine’, Salomon van Ruysdael” and indeed offers a version of van Ruysdael’s 1650 painting of the same name. Taking the Dutch landscapist as a source, Fauerso points to a contentious point in the history of art that once saw 17th century Holland as the ur-moment of naturalistic landscape painting — where finally vision was able to accurately transcribe nature to canvas. As Ann Jensen Adams explains, however, this supposed naturalism was more accurately a way of placating a variety of social tensions as much as it was a way of serving up pleasurable experiences to viewers. Yet Fauerso’s version of the van Ruysdael, as is apparent in the print, makes no pretensions to naturalistic transcription. The work is made through her subtractive painterly process where she applies layers of paint to a canvas typically on her studio floor and then removes the paint to shape her composition. At the center of the After ‘Marine’ pillow, one finds a key to this process: two sharp marks interrupt the mast of the ship and the sky, and these are physical hiccups in Fauerso’s scrapping process that have resulted from bumps in the floor beneath the canvas. Indeed, her process and these marks insist on the materiality of both the canvas and the process of making — this is not, in other words, a window onto nature but rather a material object made by a body in a particular space.
Joey Fauerso, “Bedroom Paintings,” video, 23 minutes 44 seconds
Equally significant, is the way Fauerso instantiates not just her own bodily presence but also those of the viewers of her work. If the prints might suggest a return to opticality by essentially documenting what cannot be fully apprehended in the video, the images are so small that they demand viewers move right up to their surface, in order to see, sometimes squinting, the details. The strained vision demanded by the prints echoes the obstructed vision of the video, and both offer a tension between vision and the body. In fact, this tension usefully refuses to keep vision and body on two separate sides of an imaginary binary. The video, for instance, is intensely and evenly lit, something akin to a laboratory, where it would seem that all is available for an inquiring viewer. The overhead shot of the bed similarly offers an all-encompassing view. Yet, this is all frustrated as the living bodies and represented bodies cover over, twist upon, and merge with one another. It is here that the voyeurism of, say, Degas or so many other artists depicting women’s bodies for the male gaze seems to come under particular scrutiny. And more than that Fauerso signals the false separation between body and representation — both are constructions and mutually entangled.
As with the proximate viewing demanded by the prints, the video also interpolates the viewer’s body as a physical thing. In one section, Fauerso speeds up the video and adds a somewhat frenetic soundtrack. The result is such that looking at the screen almost becomes difficult (at least for the present spectator), and as a result, the sleepless thrashing around in the bed captured in the video feels proximate — that is, one’s own discomfort at viewing the harsh technical arrangement of the video feels analogous to the living bodies’ inability to sleep within the harsh technical arrangement of the bedroom in which the video is shot.
Describing is quite simply not sufficient to challenge the glut of vision-oriented voyeurism populating the history of painting. Fauerso here and throughout her oeuvre challenges spectators to feel the impacts of looking, the male gaze, and the structures that continue to claim distanced authority over bodies and space.
Further Reading: Ann Jensen Adams, “Competing Communities in the ‘Great Bog of Europe’: Identity and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting,” in Landscape and Power, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 35-76.
Bedroom Paintings runs through October 19, 2024 at David Shelton Gallery, in Houston.
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