Elizabeth Peyton: Angel

Elvis’s Eyes. Angel. Elvis. Echo from Thus Love. Luca, maker of I am Love. Leonardo-Jack and Rose-Titanic. Mai. Mary Magdalene. Ang Tsherin Lama. Lara, Flowers. These are all traces of a “visionary company of love,” as the poet Hart Crane put it in his powerful poem about cathedrals from 1932, “The Broken Tower.” To discover this visionary company in an exhibition whose title can be traced back to the ancient Greek term angelos, meaning messenger, protector, someone who comes to guide us on our way.

Peyton’s subjects all become angels in her work, where light and emotion are rendered with the intensity of her distinctive humanism: a close-looking akin to love. In each subject’s specificity, the artist transmits the universal feelings that connect us to each other and to art, that stretch from our present moment back through time. In their togetherness, they constitute a painted world transmitting that ecstatic life force we feel in cathedrals and on mountain tops and which is present in each of us.

In Mai (Afterlife) after Sir Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mai (Omai), 1776, Peyton depicts the titular subject of Joshua Reynolds’s eighteenth-century portrait. In the present rendition, Peyton focuses entirely on Mai’s face.