Thoughts That Cure Radically: Joyce Pensato ‘Batman Returns’ Friedrich Petzel Gallery

1996, the year Joyce Pensato made her penultimate Batman drawings and paintings, was sandwiched between Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever from 1995 and Batman and Robin from 1997. Batman, in both popular cinema and in Joyce Pensato’s new work at Friedrich Petzel, has been revived, with deleterious results in at least one instance. Luckily, Pensato has not fallen into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Ice Man territory, but implements a gestural pop sensibility to a satisfying effect. Pensato’s new paintings, drawings and studio objects play to her fascination with popular and underground culture.

Having recently relocated from her Williamsburg studio, Pensato has chosen to display studio props and photographs alongside her paintings and drawings of Batman, Homer Simpson and Krazy Kat. K-Mart sculptures of Homer, stuffed dolls and Halloween masks are jumbled next to photographs of Boston Terriers, Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta and cartoons. The objects have been sprayed, or bathed, by the arterial gush of Pensato’s black and white enamel paint. The life-sized Christmas Santa and plush bunny rabbits have been deeply tarnished by years of layering of turpentine, paint and charcoal dust. A few of the new paintings and pastel drawings move away from her standard black and white towards a Renoir-lite palette.

Seeing an artist’s studio detritus publicly displayed creates an inevitable staging effect. Theatricality mixes with camp and draws to mind the equally performative painter/impresario Francis Bacon. Similar to Bacon, Pensato relies upon photographs and culturally specific images—Donald Duck, 90’s cartoons—as girders for her paintings that can be recreated, or performed, Ad infinitum. Unlike Bacon, who never needed to move from his Mews Street studio, Pensato has felt the need to relocate work spaces. Displaying the objects alongside the paintings speaks not only to a change for the artist, but also to the changing nature of the Borough of Brooklyn, from yard sale eclecticism to boutique display.

Oddly, despite the overt aggressiveness of the paint handling and sarcasm of the content, lies a deep, poignant, nostalgia. Pensato’s Batman is certainly not Christian Bale, or George Clooney or Michael Keaton, but Adam West’s version from the 1960’s. The Simpsons remains an early nineties affair in sensibility and tone. Pensato’s universe does not include Family Guy, American Dad or even Sponge Bob. Formally, her work hearkens even earlier. Black and white enamel of course brings to mind Kline, but the arrangement of objects also recalls Claes Oldenburg’s The Store from 1961. Maybe, in the end, everything becomes a parlor piece. Brooklyn may be the new Manhattan, but Homer Simpson also might be the new Grace Kelley.