In “Eve’s Law,” Scott Taylor continues to explore the boundaries of portraiture with an ongoing series inspired by his earlier paintings, all variously entitled “Eve” (2005). The original Eves are painted collages offigures composed of imagery culled from magazines and art historical reproductions whose faces are un-discernable and distorted. These paintings evolved as a metaphor for the studio, the artist’s process, and as a challenge to the standard of the female as art object. Again, though starting with a familiar idea of the portrait, Taylor in this series renders imagined figures: the new subjects emerge almost accidentally through his deliberate process. Emphasizing stroke and gesture Taylor reasserts the mysterious sexuality of the female that has been both a device and inspiration for art since Antiquity.

Painted in high key yellowish-greens, the pieces here loosely reference American science-fiction cinema from the 1950’s as well as Picabia, DeKooning and early European Primitivism. Similarly, Taylor’s “portraits” or “portrayals” of the new “Eves” often appear fetishistic or coital – like the actresses in sci-fi B-films or pulp fiction covers. In “Yellow Hopi” the subject’s face is rendered in smears, stabs and drips transformed from sunglasses and lipstick smiles to a mask of exploding brushwork. In “Eve or Dora,” dowel-like protruding eyes and full lips melt against thick elongated blue-green brush strokes that give shape to the sitter’s head. Like Pygmalion, Taylor’s ambition in the studio is to create a desirable figure out of raw material.