Boy O Boy II

Julie Heffernan’s new paintings resemble what would likely happen if the painters of the French Rococo had suddenly gained access to powerful psychotropic substances. Each of the thirteen new works presented here is an elaborate, multi-dimensional composition featuring multiple cascades of signs, figures, and other heaps of ominous still-life objects. All are set in bucolic natural surroundings, where sublime abundance and the obsessively over-manicured collide in a manner that bespeaks the moment when the contrived harmonies of eighteenth-century painting can be imagined to run horribly awry. In most cases, the effect is one of high comedy, even as it is also a bittersweet reflection of a world where the nostalgia for historical order gives way to post-historical chaos.

Viewers, however, keep coming back to being rather astounded by just how much is going on in each individual painting, as each teems with a profusion of visual incidents. Most of these are quite specific and maddeningly peculiar, and in all cases, they seem even more so when they are read in the context of others formed of the same degree of descriptive consideration.

Seven of the thirteen works in this exhibition feature a young blond-haired male figure, a semi-nude “Adonis type” to borrow a term from the old Winkelmanian typology, and he is placed in a central position amidst each of these paintings’ profuse compositions. The figure is in fact a portrayal of the artist’s grown son at the age where he is beginning his adult life, and his position as the protagonist within these works is

Self-Portrait Holding Up, 2010; oil on canvas, 68 x 66 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Catharine Clark Gallery.

not dissimilar to the way that Heffernan has used self-portrait figures in previous works, three of which are also included here. The figures are convincing, but in terms of sheer interest, they pale in relation to the insanely complex worlds surrounding them, in which veritable avalanches of allegory-laced objects and situations are heaped up like piles of forgotten treasure in forlorn forests of melancholic delight.

Boy O Boy II is on view at Catharine Clark Gallery, in San Francisco, through October 29, 2011.