Colección: PAIRS

Last summer, the artist John R. Thompson (Schenectady, NY, 1947) approached his gallery with a modest proposal for their annual ‘women’s art’ show: What if it included men? 

Like many of his peers, Thompson had been confounded in recent years by the identitarian turn in art — not so much among artists themselves, who can and should make whatever work compels them, but among curators, who seemed increasingly inclined to group creators by demographic. A gay man who’s spent 50 years working in abstraction, Thompson found the idea facile, anachronistic, and maybe even offensive. What, after all, did these artists have in common aside from the slippery, mutable notion of their gender? Weren’t they engaged in conversations — even, perhaps most interestingly, antagonistic ones — with makers outside their groups? What did those conversations sound like? What fires could they spark?

Pairs, as its title suggests, consists of 15 pairings of artworks, most from Thompson’s personal collection, grouped together under larger visual and thematic umbrellas: flowers or faces, violence or a sense of the uncanny. In recent years, questioning identity as an organizing principle has become nearly as fashionable as it was, a few years ago, to treat representation as a panacea for eons of discrimination. And yet, this show, which began as an impish provocation, aims, in its final form, to evoke something richer, warmer, more generous. Thompson knows how the pairs came together, what they suggest for him, but has chosen to elide that information to draw the viewer in, to turn ‘dialogue’ — by definition an engagement between two subjects — into polyphony. It’s bountiful and rhizomatic, like so much of Thompson’s own work, expanding outward to inspire thought and laughter and doubt. It’s an instigation to mischief.