The hateful modern tendency to try to inject content through pretentious and oblique language added after the fact comes off as desperate and only serves to highlight the fundamental nothingness of these parlor tricks. These illustrations are the visual equivalent of a Pringle – tasteless, unnourishing, and destined for oblivion with the next trip to the bathroom.

But Jenny can’t let that go – too much anxiety about other things. So the facture never quite gains traction, as you note. The strokes are just so much flourish and fill, and you sense she knows it and hopes the content ‘hurts’ enough to compensate. But these are ‘chops’ at their cheapest. And what we get is really so much melodrama. Bacon can get away with a certain amount of that because he’s prepared to play for much higher stakes – the whole picture plane in fact – and there is an outrageously absurdist sense of humor in there. But with Jenny that side of things, the Claustrophobia Meets Outsize, facture as makeup – I sense is actually on the wane.

Maternity might not be a bad time to take a good break and step back from the product for a while.

Two experiences came to me as I read this article. They both rang true for me on a visceral level. The first was my seeing a DeKooning retrospective at the Whitney Museum many years ago. I was moved deeply by his paintings from the late 1940’s through the early 50’s. I remember feeling that the “essence and fungi” of his existence were literally present in the works. In a powerful way, they transcended the notion of art as signage.

The second experience of equal power came in front of a Lucian Freud painting of two Buddha statues sitting on a soap stone sink with water slowly cascading toward and into the drain. Here too, I felt this sense of mental/emotional transcendence of materials into real poetic substance.This painting also nullified the idea of art as visual sign. It was, being as dramatic as the situation calls for, a case of the bread and wine becoming “the body and blood.”