{"id":148430,"date":"2025-08-15T18:04:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T18:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/148430\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T18:04:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T18:04:13","slug":"alex-da-corte-survey-in-texas-finds-the-dark-side-in-his-buoyant-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/148430\/","title":{"rendered":"Alex Da Corte Survey in Texas Finds the Dark Side in His Buoyant Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMost kids who are into Disney\u2014which is to say, most kids in general\u2014typically surround themselves with representations of Disney Princesses. But when Alex Da Corte<\/a> made his first painting, at age 12, for the walls of childhood bedroom, he instead depicted the characters who antagonize these Princesses. Rather than sleeping beneath Cinderella, her evil stepmother loomed above his feet at night. A smiling Ursula appeared to emerge from a nearby window; Ariel was nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

\n\tDa Corte is now in his mid-40s, but he seems no more interested in Disney Princesses now than he did 30 years ago. The only Disney Princess that does appear in his current survey, at Texas\u2019s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth<\/a>, is Elsa the Snow Queen, of the \u201cFrozen\u201d movies. She appears as an upside-down standee in A Time to Kill (2016), a wall-hung work that also includes the cardboard from which she was cut, a faux bouquet with a knife stuck in it, two mini disco balls, and a Star Wars Storm Trooper standee. Inverted and left to dangle, this Elsa wears a smile that becomes a frown.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Modern<\/p>\n

\n\tThat frown makes sense, because despite the twee reds and pinks of this work\u2019s slats, A Time to Kill is about something horrible: the 2016 shooting at Pulse, in which 49 people were killed and 53 were wounded at the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Da Corte does not explicitly represent that massacre or even directly allude to it, which may just be the point. (And you probably would not know it\u2019s about that subject, either, unless you read the wall text.) He seems fascinated by the notion that Elsa and the multitude of American pop-cultural signifiers with which he works are emblematic of something insidious\u2014even when they seem cheery and fun.<\/p>\n

\n\tIs Da Corte celebrating all this pop culture or critiquing it? For much of the past decade, I couldn\u2019t tell. It was often hard for me to tell from the camped-up videos in which he dressed up as Frankenstein\u2019s monster, Eminem, and Mister Rogers; the large-scale installations he filled with mod furniture and design objects, such as one that transformed an entire New York building into a haunted house<\/a>; and the big sculptures he made of witches\u2019 hats and homes. I began to write off Da Corte as an artist more interested in surfaces than ideas as a result.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDa Corte\u2019s A Time to Kill (at right, from 2016) meditates on the Pulse shooting.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth<\/p>\n

\n\tHow wrong I was. The Fort Worth show convinced me that, in deliberately omitting anything viewers might find too disturbing, Da Corte was mimicking how corporations, movie studios, record labels, and the media push certain people out of the picture, so that we can no longer see them. His work, I realized, is about everything you can\u2019t see because it isn\u2019t put front and center.<\/p>\n

\n\tTake The End (2017), a print in which a blurry rainbow is sliced into three fragments. Da Corte has intentionally created two cuts that correspond to the edges of Mariah Carey\u2019s body on the cover for her 1999 album Rainbow, in which the arch of colors jumps from the wall behind Carey onto her white tank top. But that smiling pop star isn\u2019t here, leaving this rainbow looking sad and bereft. Excising Carey, a gay icon, could be seen as a violent gesture\u2014especially so for a queer artist\u2014or, perhaps, a campy one not meant to be taken too seriously.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven more telling is the 2021 painting The Great Pretender in which a pair of hands hold a white top hat surrounded by stars. The hands once belonged to Lily Tomlin, a lesbian comedian who graced the cover of a 1977 issue of TIME magazine in a white top hat for a profile that didn\u2019t mention her sexual identity upon her request. With Tomlin now absent, the painting becomes a statement about erasure\u2014specifically queer erasure\u2014as enacted by the media. What we see in a magazine like TIME is often only a part of the picture.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAlex Da Corte, The End, 2017.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto John Bernardo\/\u00a9Alex Da Corte<\/p>\n

\n\tFor this survey, titled \u201cThe Whale\u201d and on view through September 7, curator Alison Hearst has focused on Da Corte\u2019s painting practice, which is a less exhibited part of his oeuvre. That might seem strange, especially given the fact that Da Corte says in the exhibition\u2019s catalog, \u201cI don\u2019t like canvas. I don\u2019t like the feeling of paint on canvas. It sickens me to death.\u201d (This isn\u2019t much of an exaggeration: none of the 60 or so works by him marshalled here are conventional oil-on-canvas paintings.) But the works in this show go a long way in clarifying the sickly-sweet flavors evoked in his well-known video installations.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show finds Da Corte returning repeatedly to Halloween and horror movies, neither of which seem particularly fun in this artist\u2019s hands. Two of the earliest paintings in the show, both from 2014, feature appropriated images from a website advertising couple\u2019s costumes\u2014one showing a beaming bacon-and-eggs twosome, the other depicting a peanut butter and jelly sandwich combo. Their smiles appear to warp because of the way Da Corte has let this image crumple. With titles namechecking both Jeff Koons\u2019s pornographic \u201cMade in Heaven\u201d paintings and Michelangelo\u2019s Last Judgement, these works feel more than a little evil.<\/p>\n

\n\tDa Corte\u2019s horror-inflected spirit is also found in 2019\u2019s Non-Stop Fright (Bump in the Night), one of several upholstered works made from foam here. Across its seven panels, the work shows a jack o\u2019 lantern that has been cracked, leaving its grin incomplete and its innards exposed. At least one other soft painting also hints at carnage: The Anvil (2023) takes its form from the steel blocks that typically fall on Wile E. Coyote as he chases after Road Runner.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tThe Anvil (2023, at right) alludes to images seen in Looney Tunes.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth<\/p>\n

\n\tWorks like The Anvil seem lighthearted and amiable. But in omitting Wile E. Coyote, Da Corte seems to have something serious on his mind: the ways that certain individuals are scrubbed out and made invisible. So maybe it makes sense, then, that in the only work billed as a self-portrait here\u2014a 2019 painting called Triple Self-Portrait (Study), featuring a painter\u2019s tools stuck in a mug\u2014the artist isn\u2019t even represented at all. And if you\u2019re unsure whether this is a political gesture, check out Untitled Protest Signs (2021), in which pastel-colored monochromes appear in place of activist slogans, a gesture that seems to mimic how the silencing of protesters\u2019 messages by those in power.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe title of Da Corte\u2019s self-portrait appears to reference a famed 1960 self-portrait by Norman Rockwell<\/a>, which shows the artist painting a self-portrait as he peeks over the canvas to look at himself in a mirror. Rockwell\u2019s paintings helped formulate a distinctly American sense of middle-class identity for many white surburbanites in the postwar era, and Da Corte once said that his father, a Venezuelan immigrant, may have discovered that the US was \u201cHell\u201d when he arrived there\u2014a far cry from what he might have imagined. The artist described wanting to channel that view in early works, and perhaps he\u2019s done so, as well, in Triple Self-Portrait, which at first glance seems gleeful, then appears eerily vacant upon extended viewing.<\/p>\n

\n\tTriple Self-Portrait could be read as a negation of a beloved painterly genre, just as Da Corte\u2019s appropriations of pop culture are often negations in their own ways. He\u2019s even curated a nice grouping of works from the Modern Art Museum\u2019s collection for his exhibition. This part of the show is largely centered on the great white males of recent art history: abstractions by Frank Stella, a word painting by Ed Ruscha, a screen-printed gun by Andy Warhol, self-portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe and Francis Bacon. But alongside these works, Da Corte is also showing his own subversions like Mirror Marilyn (2022\u201323), in which Warhol\u2019s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn is appropriated, then printed backward.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAlex Da Corte, Eclipse, 2021.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto John Bernardo\/\u00a9Alex Da Corte<\/p>\n

\n\tEdits, deletions, and removals are common in Da Corte\u2019s works about art history. Eclipse (2021) riffs on Roy Lichtenstein\u2019s I Can See the Whole Room\u2026and There\u2019s Nobody in It! (1961), in which those words are painted above a man looking through a peephole. All we get in Da Corte\u2019s take, however, is the peephole itself, with no one there to do the peeping. Da Corte, who is currently in the process of cocurating a Whitney Museum retrospective for Lichtenstein, drains this Pop artist\u2019s work of meaning, then gives it a new one through his title, which suggests that the yellow crescent seen here may represent the moon passing before the sun.<\/p>\n

\n\tYet maybe this isn\u2019t all so cynical. Eclipses temporarily leave the world in darkness, leaving people to momentarily find new ways of seeing. Perhaps that is exactly what Da Corte intends to do with his total eclipse of art, which asks viewers to imagine new people to fill Lichtenstein\u2019s empty room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most kids who are into Disney\u2014which is to say, most kids in general\u2014typically surround themselves with representations of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":148431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[87518,648,1032,1033,171,28493,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-148430","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-alex-da-corte","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-modern-art-museum-of-fort-worth","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115034106384069447","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}