Queer artist Alex Da Corte
JAMES RUSSEL | Contributing Writer
James.Journo@gmail.com
Alex Da Corte wants to blow everything up.
The queer Venezuelan American artist likes to deconstruct, shed the source material of its meaning and then remake it. Take his paintings, a selection of which are on display in the exhibition Alex Da Corte: The Whale at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through Sept. 7, a survey of the past 15 years of him lobbing bombs.
Actually, these works aren’t paintings at all. In fact, he told curator Alison Hearst of the medium, “I don’t like canvas. I don’t like the feeling of paint on canvas. It sickens me to death.”
Instead, these works are sculptures and prints made with unconventional materials, like neoprene and soap. They’re references to his life, pop culture and the news.
At face value, Da Corte’s art, including his videos and installations, could easily be written off as full of fluff, lazy conceptualism and queerer than the web browser history of an anti-gay closeted politician. But it’s not just for irony or shock value. The guy takes his favorite comic book characters, retro album covers, childhood myths — and he breaks them.
In a time of cultural erasure, where queer people are swiftly being removed from the public record, the Philadelphia-based artist could not be more relevant.
Plenty of artists are relevant for tapping into whatever makes us insecure at the moment. Some last because they’re documenting. Others have a lasting impact on art.
Da Corte matters because of what he does and how he does it: He removes subjects from their context leaving only remnants then slathers them with pastel colors.
Take the exhibit’s namesake work, The Whale. It’s a reference to Jonah from the Book of Jonah in the Bible, who, in one of the more famous biblical passages, was swallowed by a whale (referred to in the book as a big fish) for disobeying God. He floats through its body before being blown back out.
It’s a journey of redemption, one that inspired speculation and theories, including by psychologist Carl Jung, who saw the journey through the whale as traveling through ghosts, and theorist Joseph Campbell, whose “belly of the whale” alludes to renewal.
But the whale here is not a journey culminating in a self-portrait of the artist covered in glitter and cum. The only self portrait in the exhibit, Triple Self Portrait (Study) (2019) is of the artist’s tools. It’s a reference to Norman Rockwell, the late painter who idealized American life in the 20th century.
The whale is instead represented by a large, black anvil. The Anvil (2023) is a reference to the classic Baby Huey comic in which an oversized baby duck, in one scene, is seen playing with an anvil. Both are part of Da Corte’s “puffy paintings,” made from neoprene, a type of rubber, and other materials.
In an essay for the accompanying catalogue, scholar Kemi Adeyemi writes, Da Corte’s Electronic Renaissance (2021) is “in the running for [his] gayest painting.” Adeyemi is right. It is also among Da Corte’s strongest work, a perfect companion to the weight of the anvil, whale and self portrait work.
Electronic Renaissance replicates the cover of The Story of Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet, a 1970 book and record published by Walt Disney, which is about two hats (Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue Bonnet) who sit atop two horses and become lovers. When Alice’s horse is sold, Johnny has a meltdown. And when his is sold, he tries to find her and eventually does.
For this “reverse glass” painting, where the images are made in reverse order, Da Corte removes the language from the cover and keeps the images. Stripped of their names and any narrative, the presumably straight love story becomes one where they are free to be queer.
A Time to Kill (2016) is one of his sculptural slatwall paintings. It looks equally playful, with Elsa the Snow Queen from the Frozen movies, a knife stuck in a faux bouquet, two mini disco balls, a Star Wars stormtrooper and other objects set against slats of various hues of purple, orange and red.
It’s one of those works where you ask, “What the hell is he doing?”
What he’s doing is confronting the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a queer nightclub in Orlando where 49 people were killed and 53 were wounded. As always with Da Corte, it’s about a lot, like the violation of queer space, the banality of violence and the commercialization of childhood.
It’s proof there’s sometimes no happy ending. But that doesn’t mean, as Da Corte shows, we shouldn’t stop trying.