Janet Werner
"Janet Werner" by David Balzer, Spring 2007, p. 114
In her well-known portrait paintings, Janet Werner seems fascinated with what George Eliot, in Daniel Deronda, calls pettishness: a peevish brattiness often characteristic of pretty, spoiled girls and (in a possible etymological connection) their pets—cats and toy dogs. Pettishness may be officially frowned upon, but it persists as a pop-cultural trope in exaggeratedly feminine products like accessories, tabloid celebrities and candy-coloured films. (Sofia Coppola’s recent film Marie Antoinette is an unabashed ode to pettishness.)
Werner’s new show, “Up here in heaven,” goes to great lengths to explain the allure and tenacity of pettishness. In her boldest new paintings—large-format space scenes depicting supernovas and nebulae mingling with cameos, bunnies, chihuahuas and, startlingly, what looks to be Britney Spears’s face—one finds a meditation on the very nature of the beautiful, especially in the Kantian-Burkean sense. Here, cultivated prettiness and cuteness—in a seeming parody of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey— become parts of a sublime, star-born life force. Which, of course, they are: hungry doe eyes and expressive, pouty lips are elemental; they issue forth implicit demands to be nurtured, and are thus as vital to evolutionary success as sharp teeth or muscular hind legs.
Werner’s style is, accordingly, deliberate and chunky: a messy rendering of Paris Hilton is not a lampoon, but a quasi-expressionist attempt to capture the cosmic nothingness in her eyes. Prairies is a masterful study in pink: the figure’s transcendent immersion in this colour, and Werner’s command of it, prove that pink can indeed be a wild and preeminent thing. The figure’s pink T-shirt (dotted with leopard print, of course) and lipstick, as well as the strange hue of her right ear, seem of a piece with the pink of the setting sun behind her, an affinity that augments her strength like blush on an elegant, angular cheekbone.
Similarly, Eclipse and Girl on cliff put overtly decorated women in nature and demonstrate how their forms mimic those of trees, flowers and rocks. Yet Werner’s women are also alien to their grey-and-brown milieus; the viewer latches on to them readily, desperately, greedily. One thinks of Baudelaire, who in “The Painter of Modern Life” praises this paradox, wherein beauty, spurning bland nature, must turn to decoration for its very survival, in order to “conquer hearts and rivet attention.” In this way, Werner’s art becomes curiously, brilliantly indistinguishable from the heavenly creatures she paints.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
