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These paintings speak of emotional collapse -- implosion, almost -- and survival. Done with a severe palette (Rothenberg's excursions into color, in recent years, have been tentative), they have a hard grip on the eye. Of late, whole figures have reappeared in her work. By all rights, Green Ray, 1984, with its two capering figures in a lurid spotlight on a stage of some sort -- Teddy bears, or Mickey Mice, surmounted by human masks -- ought to look merely absurd; yet their forlorn hoofings imply unwelcome news about the state of being an artist.
In fact, despite the abysmal state of fashion and ephemera, some depictive art of the '80s in America is in fine shape. Those who doubt this might consult the current retrospective of the fluent, tantalizingly mysterious work of Jennifer Bartlett, 44, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. One might also adduce the small, concentrated paintings of Mark Innerst, 28, which inject photo-derived images of Great Tourist Views (colossi of Memnon in Egypt, the Hudson River landscape of the 19th century) with a remarkable feel for the subtleties of atmosphere.
Or one could cite the Texas artist John Alexander, 40. Despite occasional derailments into a sort of demonic cartooning, Alexander's spiky, haunted style is one of intense graphic vitality. He has revived cliches of ferocious nature and made them work in an absolutely authentic way. His Hobbesian sense of the world, the battle of all against all, extends from the swamps of Louisiana (populated by a tangled bestiary of paranoid deer, coons, foxes, bright-eyed, indifferent herons and fish-chomping alligators, glaring at one another like bikers on Methedrine) to the boardrooms of the Sunbelt. Thanks to a Baptist background, he also has a taste for the religious grotesque, which gets full play in Tintorettoesque machines like The Little Prince Prohibited from Polishing His Crown, 1984.
The work of Eric Fischl, 43, has a quite different tone. Fischl's subject is what has been called the crisis of American identity, the failure of the American dream. From this he is assembling a wholly distinctive vision of the white middle-class social fabric, relentlessly ironic and, if not affectionate, then certainly fixated. It is packed with family tension, sexual farce and erotic misery.
Fischl country is a place of shag carpets lit by the desolate glare of TV sets, of king-size beds seen as altars of suburban promiscuity, and blue swimming pools that slyly parody David Hockney's less tainted vision of a Californian Eden. It smells of unwashed dog, Bar-B-Q lighter fluid and sperm. It is permeated with voyeurism and resentful, secretive tumescence -- a theater of adolescent tension and adult anonymity. Fischl paints this world of failed intimacies with conviction and narrative grip: at best, his drawing is beautifully concise (though marred, at present, by too many botched and hasty passages), and his use of cinematic framing and lighting conventions gives his scenes a subtle push-pull of vividness and artificiality. This artist is clearly set for the long haul, into the 21st century.