Claudia Doring-Baez yet again proves herself an emotionally ambitious painter of pronounced narrative impulse. Telling stories without submitting to the banality inherent in illustration, she takes on tales that are big and famous while allowing neither their substance nor their celebrity to overwhelm her. My introduction to her work, in 2014, was a show in Bushwick about Proust’s great novel. The insouciant mix of breezy freshness and almost obliviously anachronistic echoes of somewhat peripheral (Albert Marquet, Marie Laurencin) Ecole de Paris visions seemed the perfect vehicle for exploring lost time. Now, in a diptych presentation, collectively titled The Raw and the Cooked, with a show of Sophie Iremonger (Doring-Baez’s curated by Karen Wilkin, Iremonger’s by Robert James Anderson) at La Galleria La Mama, she has taken on an equally notoriously closure-evading classic, Alain Renais’s defining movie of the new wave, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). She used stills from cut scenes as if to undermine any icon dependence in her deep delving of the characters in the movie. As Wilkin observes, something of the quality of pre-Nouvelle Vague posters pervades these images of handmade immediacy. They occupy an ethereal space between stylization and non-style. DAVID COHEN
March 15 to April 14, 2018, 47 Great Jones Street, between Lafayette Street and Bowery, New York City, lamama.org
pictured: ‘I love, I already loved to hear you laugh’ 2018. Oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the Artist