Ross Chisholm, “Fin”

The British artist Ross Chisholm displays both great affection and irreverence for the vintage material—photographs of vacationers, reproductions of 18th- and 19th- century portrait paintings—that he has collected, reconstituted and manipulated for his New York debut show. While he seems to revel in the Old Master technique of oil painting, with its small shifts in tonality, its immaculate rendering of the folds and flow of fabric and the translucence of skin, he has no qualms tampering with these images, turning the traditional and formal into something bizarre and unsettling. By transposing backgrounds and introducing stark geometric shapes and smeary blotches of paint, he both interacts with the original source and stakes his claim on it.

In some instances, Chisholm interposes his own marks on found prints. But the majority of the works find him re-creating the imagery from scratch, then overlaying it with spikes, the recurring motif in this new series. In the book-size painting ,em>Irradiation, they slice through the face and body of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s 1779 Lady Jane Halliday. In the title piece, Fin, a painting on a stained and prestamped cardboard, the billowing dress of another Reynold’s subject, Jane, Countess of Harrington (1775), is accentuated with thorns all along the back, rendering it both punky and animalistic and displacing it from its time.

While charmingly redolent of memory and nostalgia, his reconstructions of the Brits-abroad photographs fall flat next to these works. In his intimate appropriation of seminal art by his British ancestors, Chisholm effectively questions the inviolability of history—and specifically art history. But with a slight tweak, he demonstrates, reality can become otherworldly.—Nana Asfour

See more Art reviews