Celeste Dupy-Spencer Sold at Auction Prices

Over the years I have come to know Celeste (and her paintings) with all the complexities a person or a thing can have. The paintings (like the person) are filled with anger, longing, resentment, humor, shame, and a total lack of fear around self expression. They are judgmental, proud, and self reflexive (especially around humiliation). And, they brood over lived experience. They travel to Celeste’s childhood places, her recent, wrought time living in New Orleans, and her reconnection with painting and all the avaricious baggage it carries. Like a true satirist Celeste looks at her cultural heritage and surroundings with a magnifying glass. A row of macabre figures wait in line to get coffee at an NA meeting, and though Celeste renders them grimly, other paintings (like Me and Brandi, Goodbye Brandi), suggest that she’s earned her right to gallows humor.

Half Jewish, half Cajun Celeste paints to honor the proletariat, in the communist tradition of her family, but also to identify with them as an afflicted Southerner. Like the Verists in Germany after WWI the paintings reflect a certain horror and ennui of our time, inescapable poverty, and unforgivable wealth. They examine this divide, and others; between the north and the south, between Republicans and liberals, and between the artist’s class (if such a thing exists) and artists themselves. This new body of work takes stock of how liberalism has changed in her lifetime. In Sports bar/Used to be a Gay Bar, sports fans and ghostly gays intermingle, the latter with a problematic invisibility. The Matriarchs of the Hudson Valley (1980s-90s), portraitizes women from Celeste’s Rhinebeck childhood, chain smoking, booze drinking, “baby boomers for multiculturalism,” who serve as contradistinction to the urban aesthetes of Closing Party (Hit the North) exhausted from moving as they sit around a picnic table strategizing repairs in their new fixer-upper, and the best place to compost.

The paintings pay little mind to a “style” of painting, though Celeste’s intimacy and comfort with paint, as well as the painted subject, is obvious. The paintings for this show remind me of Elaine De Kooning’s portraits of JFK — they’re painted with a love so big and absurd, the act of painting becomes an irony in and of itself. (Like Elaine De Kooning, Celeste too, has a love of sports that figures prominently in the work.) The paintings recognize that popular culture and politics are inseparable in America’s 2016. With an earnestness that mirrors Celeste’s love of country music (which is, eventually, infectious to those around her) the work is infused with song, just like life, or at least any life worth living. What Celeste is reading, watching, and hanging on to (pictures, notes, favorite mugs, ashtrays and other small possessions) all get painted into the work. And these collected things are part biography, part feminist creed. Her serpentine doctrine, though, keeps the work dialectical. The philandering drunk, George Jones, maybe the most famous country music singer ever, is pictured belovedly in one of the drawings (and Celeste genuinely loves him). In the original drawing for Fall With Me For a Million Days (My Sweet Waterfall) “a guy,” again, most definitely a self portrait, scans his computer’s music library (in the throes of an attack of memories) and slouches — his love and nostalgia is so overwhelming it erupts into a painful back deformity. Jones too, operates like a kind of symbol for deformity, the kind that grows within you when your anger turns into a sort of infatuation; the deepest, most unrealistic love of humanity. It is this unrealistic love of humanity, and perhaps an unrealistic love of self that unifies the characters in these paintings. From the cheering fans at a Trump rally to the 7Eleven guy in How Long U Got? These figures express blind hope in the face of absolute, maddening hopelessness.