“I get up, I read the paper and I feel like a Cro-Magnon.” – Robert Feintuch

For the last ten years Robert Feintuch has made paintings using himself as his model. Though the paintings might be seen as self-portraits, in many his face is turned away from the viewer or otherwise obscured.

This exhibition includes small paintings of the artist in spaces that feel intimate, whether he is undressing, asleep in bed, or standing in his underwear and reading the newspaper. The newspaper shows up often in both the paintings and drawings and many of these images could be moments in a narrative sequence from quotidian, lived life.

At the same time, the paintings show the influence of sources ranging from Northern European painting to cartoons. In Cro-Magnon Bacchus, set like the other paintings in an unspecified but intimate space, Feintuch stands posing in his underwear, with his face pulled forward, a bunch of grapes in his hand, and a club hidden behind his back. The gap between mundane reality and classical ideals makes this image of aggression funny, sad and true.

In all of the work the relationships between the intimacy of the viewpoint and scale, the color and light, and the subject matter, point towards metaphors based in everyday life.