A 10-Year-Long Art History Course

Marlborough Gallery ''Cockaigne, 1993-2003''



By MIA FINEMAN



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Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Land of Cockaigne."



Willem de Kooning's "Excavation."

n Vincent Desiderio's ambitious new painting, "Cockaigne," six centuries of Western art lie scattered on the floor like the remains of a really great party. A virtuoso representational painter known for his large-scale, postmodernist allegories, Mr. Desiderio worked on the 13-by-9-foot "Cockaigne" on and off for 10 years. On the pages of the books in the painting, he painstakingly reproduced miniature versions of his favorite works by artists ranging from Masaccio, Vermeer and van Eyck to Matisse, Jasper Johns and Chuck Close. The title is a reference to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Land of Cockaigne" (1559), a moral allegory set in a land of plenty where the houses are tiled with cakes, the fences are made of sausages and the fowl fly roasted and ready to eat. The targets in Bruegel's painting were gluttony and sloth; Mr. Desiderio's version is a critique of what he calls "cultural bulimia"  our compulsive consumption of images that only leaves us hungry for more. It is also a comment on the predicament of painting in the 21st century: faced with such a plethora of styles and formal idioms, how is it possible to create something new, something distinctively relevant to our own time? "Cockaigne" is one artist's response to what the critic Harold Bloom called the "anxiety of influence," an attempt, in Mr. Desiderio's words, "to reconfigure the history of art in order to create imaginative space for ourselves." The painting is on display at the Marlborough Gallery, 40 West 57th Street, through Saturday. Mr. Desiderio was trained as an abstract painter, but in the late 80's he switched to a figurative, old masterly style. However, Abstract Express-ionism remains an important influence. The all-over composition and palette-knifed surfaces of this painting were directly inspired by Willem de Kooning's "Excavation" (1950). He kept a reproduction of the de Kooning pinned to the wall next to his canvas as he worked. In its early stages, the painting was a flattened, frenetic composition of little squares. As he progressed, Mr. Desiderio transformed each square into a book that seems to lie on a receding plane. Because the perspectival orientation of each book is slightly different, the floor seems to undulate, creating the impression of a sea of floating images. Mr. Desiderio based the miniature reproductions on illustrations from his own collection of art books. The choices about how they appear in the painting - in or out of focus, obscured by shadows or reflections - were guided by their signif-icance to him rather than by perceptual accuracy. "Even if this scene really existed, this is not how a camera would see it," he said. The tilted tabletop scattered with the remains of a meal is a direct quote from Bruegel's painting, but here, at the center of the table, sits an empty golden bowl - a conspicuous figure of absence, like a postmodernist piazza in which the center (where traditionally an equestrian statue might have stood) is left empty. René Magritte's "Treachery of Images" (1929), a painting of a pipe above the legend "Ceci n'est pas un pipe" ("This is not a pipe"), is an icon of Surrealism and a forerunner of modern conceptualism. Prominently placed in the center of the picture, it serves as a sly reminder of the illusory nature of realist painting.

The image of Édouard Manet's "Piper" (1866) appears here, and in several of Mr. Desiderio's earlier paintings, as an emblem of the avant-garde, a heroic figure leading the troops into battle against the status quo - or perhaps just a young boy whistling in the dark.

Of all the illustrations, he found this Picasso portrait, "Leaning Woman" (1939), the most difficult image to reproduce because "Picasso's marks are so aggressively counter-intuitive."

Mr. Desiderio's last gesture upon completing the painting was to use a palette knife to apply white paint to this image of Marcel Duchamp's "Chocolate Grinder" (1913) - a figure connoting mindless consumption - so that the page of the book appears torn to shreds.



