Charles A. Westfall, Untitled, 2010. Photo by Bob Butler, courtesy Twin Kittens.
In his most recent body of work, Gypsy Acid Queen, Charles Westfall wrestles with female archetypes of aggression, power, and violence. “Violence,” declares Westfall, “like anything else, is gendered and comes in masculine and feminine varieties.” References to gender in this brief body of four works are oblique, but persistent. In one smaller work, thick smears of paint are partially obscured by a grid of strategically-placed paneling. Shimmering black fabric is stretched tightly over the image, into which Westfall has incised regular slits, allowing us to stare into the abyss of messy, mysteriously indecipherable paint while refusing a decisive “reveal.” A second small work bears a surgical image taken straight from a medical textbook, tarted up by the same gaudy fabric, a simultaneously enticing and repulsive moment of catastrophic abjection.
The two larger works are more literal and confrontational. A tower of skinned cow heads looms—an island of bone and flesh oozing across the otherwise tranquil sea of canvas. The skyscraper of gelatinous eyes and flared snouts is so charged with gristle, you can almost hear the ghost of Francis Bacon1 chuckling appreciatively. In the second large work, Westfall continues the butcher-shop theme with a painterly meat fantasy, slicing away even the borders of the canvas so that it is no longer square.
Charles A. Westfall, Untitled, 2010. Photo by Bob Butler, courtesy Twin Kittens.
Westfall points to “The Acid Queen” from The Who’s rock opera Tommy
The promise of transformation through sex is as old as both the first profession and the first epic. Consider Enkidu’s prostitute in the tale of Gilgamesh; she alone can bring the wild man back to his humanity. But Westfall’s work suggests that domestication—not without its own troubles—is the most benign in the range of possible outcomes of such encounters. The paintings evoke a culture in which masculine psychological or physical vulnerabilities are identified and assaulted. “It’s the perversion of a supposed feminine ideal [as] (mother, nurturer, etc.) into something cruel, destructive, predatory, and rapacious … that I found particularly unsettling,” explains Westfall.
Yet Westfall’s paintings pry open more than the problematic gendered archetypes they would seem to address on first blush. While the fear for one’s child is inflamed by the spoliative Acid Queen, that fear springs from the conflictingly “feminine ideal” of the artist’s paternal role as nurturer.
The sinew-soaked images in Gypsy Acid Queen grapple with mortality. They are both the monstrous Other and the decaying flesh of the self. The works are an acknowledgment of the near-universal impulse to protect one’s loved ones from a brutish and carnivorous world, as well as an affirmation of the folly of our flimsy precautions. Westfall’s Acid Queen is a reminder that we are each subject to this final degradation from which there will be no healing.
Disclosure: Charles A. Westfall is a regular contributor to BURNAWAY. Our publication is committed to reviewing exhibitions that significantly contribute to discourse on visual art. In the spirit of transparency, our policy is to disclose rather than exclude.
1 For a fascinating, and relevant, analysis of Bacon’s work, see Giles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005).
2 For an excellent analysis of The Who’s Tommy, see David Nicholls, “Virtual Opera, or Opera Between the Ears,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129, no. 1 (2004): 100-142.
Twin Kittens is now an official member of the Westside Arts District. Photo by Bob Butler, courtesy Twin Kittens.
Charles A. Westfall’s Gypsy Acid Queen continues through June 19. Twin Kittens gallery is open Monday through Thursday, from 11-5PM, and every third Saturday, from 11-5PM.
