Susan Kim Alvarez: Squonk, Squonky, Squonkalicious at Storage

By DAVID JAGER September 15, 2024

Storage scores another bullseye with a double show of two young women painters, Susan Kim Alvarez and Jen Deluna. It show cases two emerging talents that, despite their similarity in subject matter have vastly different approaches.

Feral is a word that barely begins to describe the astonishing new canvases of Susan Kim Alvarez, whose work devours the front room. All of 24 years, the painter seems to be so self-assured in her ferociousness the source of her energy is difficult to fathom. Yet there they are. 

Bubbling up out her own complex hybrid background- Alverez is Cuban, Vietnamese and Jewish- these new paintings seem to be a swampy fever dream of painterly, folkloric, and autobiographical reference. Each canvas is its own liminal chaotic realm of her invention, so densely packed it has no choice but to explode from the surface, their welter of compressed painterly and personal chaos has nowhere else to go but directly into the retina of the viewer. 

But there is more than pure visual sensationalism happening here. “Mud Wrestlin” is a heady conflagration of gossip, voyeurism, vanity all writhing about suggestively on canvas. Two figures, one wearing a T-Shirt that says “I love My Girlfriend”, appear to be wrestling. A smack down appears to be in progress. A maelstrom of faces and figures surrounds them.  In the lower left corner someone leers suggestively, higher up an oblivious bystander takes a selfie, two figures above them appear to be gossiping maliciously. The pornographic slogan ‘Choke Her Out’ appears in the middle, in wispy letters. Is this a wrestling match or a lover’s spat? The ambiguity of intimacy appears to be the theme. 

This is because Alvarez revels in fantasies that border on sexual violence. Her ferocious red dogs gnashing at steel chains in “Whips & Chains Excite Me”, are snarling parodies of unrestrained passion. They look positively gleefully to be chomping the scenery, and the whole bad trip on DMT effect is amplified by the background, which looks like an exploding nebula, chunks of dark matter being ejected from a bluish golden cosmic void. Alvarez again appears to be toying with the edge where intimacy tips into savagery. It’s a fraught line, and she navigates it with precocity. 

The influence of contemporary anime and vintage cartooning is evident in Alvarez’s improvised sense of line and figuration, but there is also a heavy dose of what seems like symbolist era influence. Something in the ectoplasmic looseness of her figures and faces suggest James Ensor, while the effortless looseness of her line bring Toulouse Lautrec to mind. She claims to be deeply influenced by artist Jennifer Packer, and there is a similar boldness in palette, but her wild imagination moves her away from Packer’s core classicism and closer to the fantasists of the late 19th century. 

In the back-room Jen Deluna’s watery, seemingly found images of women are as remote and flat as Alvarez’s surface are heaving and muscular. They treat the subject of intimacy as well, but at a remove. Looking at them one has the uncomfortable feeling of happening across a private trove of erotic or personal photographs. Like Alvarez, they are also paired with snarling dogs, which seem to be a stand in this show for either supressed passion or unspoken feminine rage. Maybe both?

She also paints her ever so slightly blurred photo realist subjects with an added layer of glossiness, similar to the effect of Vaseline smeared on a TV camera lens.  ‘Rallying Sigh’ seems to catch a woman in just such a position of blurry introspection.  ‘Between Two Summers” shows a woman stuck in mute recollection. Generally reserved for glamour shots, the glossy highlights on her portraits only helps to disorient. With the dogs however, fangs salaciously bared, the glistening highlights only amplify their ferality.  

Deluna borrows from the visual language of cinema and television, in other words, but only applied in ways that dredge up uncomfortable feelings. “Timid Repetitions” appears to be a moment of unrestrained frolic, but it is framed like an image paused on a videotape. The woman looking excitedly off to the side gives us no sense of place, no sense of relation. A sense of vertigo or fear creeps in when you look at her. Are we even sure she is, in fact, not shrieking in terror? 

With each painting we are given the sense of a forbidden glimpse, of happening upon an image we are not truly privy to. Nor are Deluna’s subjects glamorized by their positioning, or warmed by the technical glosses applied to their surfaces. They remain cold and forlorn, not only dislocated in time or place but also through the very medium that conveys them.

Both artists in this show address the vagaries of intimacy from opposite painterly strategies, one wildly unconstrained in her imagination and visual inventiveness, and the other judiciously held back with a strict visual formalism. Their formidable prowess is wielded in ways that allow them to explore their subject matter in counterintuitive ways, a sleight of technique that makes them both compelling and unsettling. These are virtuoso painters, but the ambiguities and feelings they explore are anything but serene.