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Fashion and other lifestyle magazines like to ask their interview subjects: What is your guilty pleasure? You're meant to answer "listening to ABBA" or "watching Oprah in the afternoons." The point of the question, particularly in interviews with artists or writers, is to bring them down to earth, show their humanity, show that their tastes are not all that different from the imaginary reader's. It's a question that always stymies me: The best I can do is come up with tastes I know are unpopular in educated circles, things I may not admit to liking among art critics.
For example, it's hard to admit to genuine contemporary-art collectors or students that one adores the pictures of Dino Valls, a Spanish painter who works in egg tempera and oil varnish. Valls's paintings are startlingly life-like, and disturbing: He creates images of fantastically beautiful young teens or children, often androgynous, who are being threatened by mysterious medical instruments or procedures. It's about the frightening vulnerability of flesh. (And, I think, a lot about unstable gender identities and Catholicism, but you might have different ideas.) You might think, on first glance, that some of these are actually photographs, but they have a luminescence that only paint can give. The paintings are often arranged as diptychs or triptychs, with several panels bearing strange symbols: open books, X-rays, lettering. In this, they often resemble religious iconography.
And, a bit, cheesy sci-fi illustration. That's the embarrassing part - it's just on the border of that territory that includes air-brushed van art. Every Goth I know would love this stuff: It's the kind of art you like if you read a lot of Oscar Wilde and have turned your dining room into a Cabinet of Curiosities. And yes, it's true: I like the Pre-Raphaelites too.
The haunting, blue-eyed pale children in these paintings are often nude, and so I thought of Valls throughout the recent controversy in Australia about the art photographs of Bill Henson, whose exhibition provoked a prolonged debate about censorship.
But that's not why admitting to liking Valls is embarrassing. It's not because his paintings are disturbing (disturbing is ho-hum if you're really into art). Nor is it because underage models are involved (he claims not to use models at all). No, it's because he is a figurative painter. No video, no installation, no component of endurance or time, no recycled materials. The figurative - particularly the beautiful figurative - can veer so quickly into the domain of kitsch or the merely decorative that it is almost entirely excluded from serious discussion.
The paint Valls uses is made from dry pigment, water and egg yolk. He then overlays it with oil glazes, for its shine. Egg tempera was used in a great deal of religious art, up until the great revolution of oil painting in the late Renaissance. It is difficult to work with, as it dries quickly and can't be reworked like oil. Every brush stroke has to be precise. The colours are generally light, too, so the best artists build layers over time to deepen them. The result can be extraordinarily rich.
Valls's conjunction of sexuality and menace recalls the work of Attila Richard Lukacs, whose vast canvases of naked skinheads, shining with gold leaf, also strive for an archaic aura, and were popular in commercial galleries in the 1990s and violently despised by some of my art-educated friends (including an art critic of this paper, who in the nineties would grow apoplectic at the mention of Lukacs's name).
Another artist I somewhat shamefacedly adore is George Tooker, the American "magic realist" of the 1940s, fifties and sixties. His most famous paintings are allegorical and dystopic. You may recognize his big canvas Subway (1950) from undergraduate poster collections: It shows pale conformist Americans looking frightened in a nightmarish subway station. (Another famously creepy one is Government Bureau, with its eyes staring from holes in glass partitions, but Tooker also did a lot of sensual, glowing nudes and portraits that don't have authoritarian overtones.) Tooker, too, was influenced by religious icons, and he too painted in egg tempera. He would probably not be included in most anthologies of influential 20th-century artists, because he did not challenge formal conventions or expand the definition of art.
Valls has been lumped into the "magic realist" category - one that includes Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, and so tends to connote a certain sentimentality or populism. But then the current star of the European art market, the Canadian-raised Peter Doig - whose painting White Canoe just sold at Sotheby's in London for £5.7-million ($11.5-million), making him Europe's most expensive living painter - has also been called "magic realist" for his mysterious landscapes. And it's cool to like Doig. It's exhausting trying to stay hip on these things.
The work of Valls brings into question the 20th-century distinction - made by critics favourable to abstraction, such as Clement Greenberg - between the avant-garde and kitsch. (The avant-garde, of course, was good; kitsch was bad.) It is commonly believed that the postmodern mentality put an end to such dichotomies. I am pleased to say that in liking Valls, I must be a postmodernist.
