Little known to the general public in our latitudes, Anthony Cudahy, at 34, is more and more talked about in the United States, his native country. The figurative artist, who lives and works in New York, was highlighted in 2021 on the walls of the Semiose gallery in Paris, which represents him in France, but is seeing his work for the first time today. presented in a French institution. In Dole, under the title Conversation, he confronts his paintings with the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts.
The artist has explored every corner and peeled the inventories, free to draw from it what he sees fit – “a rare exhaustive approach”, points out Samuel Monier, the manager of the fund. Better still, half of the canvases that Cudahy signs here were specifically made in response to his finds in the reserves of the museum, which has a few masterpieces by masters such as Courbet and Vouet. But it is not these illustrious signatories that the painter has chosen, setting his sights for a large part on small anonymous or unattributed paintings, sometimes injured, as evidenced by the protective strips that cross them. Forgotten works, from distinct periods and styles, all bearing a subject related to his painting.
Anthony Cudahy, “Rest (past)”, 2021.
/ © Photo A. Mole. Courtesy Semiose, Paris
The corpus of the American, precisely, is not easy to circumscribe, so many scattered references are mixed in it: art history (from Rembrandt to Hockney, via Gauguin), archives queer, gay iconography, personal and family stories, inspired by photographs that the artist breaks down from one canvas to another. “The transformation and degradation to which an image is subjected through reproduction create a language in itself, with its codes and its signifiers, he underlines. When I appropriate an image and translate it into painting, it is both a cover and an interpretation.”
Anthony Cudahy, “Conversation I”, 2021.
/ © Photo A. Mole. Courtesy Semiose, Paris
The precision of the drawing and the intuition of the color
Gathered on the picture rails, his works astonish by their diversity. Sometimes dazzling, sometimes disarmingly candid, it’s almost hard to believe that they come from one and the same hand. A production at the antipodes of the monotype which, although uneven, opens up a vast field of possibilities. What’s playing here? The emotion. And the spirit of community, not sexual, but artistic, when Cudahy paints his creative friends at work, starting with his companion, the photographer Ian Lewandowski, here in Photographbut also the subject of intimate, modest scenes, the immediacy of which leaves a transience charged with mystery.
Anthony Cudahy, “Self-portrait after Hockney 83′”, 2021.
/ © Photo A. Mole. Courtesy Semiose, Paris
The emotional also seems to have presided over the putting into perspective of his creations with the works exhumed from the Jura collection. From the first room, the analogy is made between a carved wooden door of the 16th century parliament of Dole and the canvas Red (past) of 2021. The motif of the lion adorning the first is found reversed on the second, sexual organs in evidence, among other mythological figures inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, surrounding a couple boys embracing on the lawn. Further on, two frames of a woman at the easel, alternately spoiled or ruined by the allegory of Fortune, stand next to a self-portrait of the young American from the one that David Hockney produced in 1983.
From this tutelary figure, Anthony Cudahy inherited the precision of the drawing and the intuition of the color, here sublimated in large blue-gray flat areas underlaid with yellow. Cudahy will perhaps know a pictorial destiny à la Hockney. We do not see, in any case, any other young figurative artist on the current international scene carrying this audacious eclecticism.