Art in America: Damian Elwes at Francis M. Naumann

The son and grandson of British portrait painters, Damian Elwes was born in England in 1960 and now lives and works in Santa Monica, Calif., where he occasionally exhibits and is widely collected by the entertainment elite. A natural for the Duchamp-oriented exhibition program of Francis M. Naumann, Elwes, in his first New York exhibition, presented paintings based on photographs of the studios of the modern mighty--Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Warhol. These large but still easel-size oils on canvas and related works on paper are enlivened by the integration of paintings and other objects not included in the source photographs. Like Sophie Matisse, who is also represented by the gallery and who recently painted versions of Picasso's Guernica in the manner of her great-grandfather, Henri Matisse, Elwes, while taking liberties, paints his way into the spirit of his subjects.

Picasso's Studio (Rue des Grands Augustins, 1937)--all paintings discussed are dated 2004--addresses the making of Guemica in the form of sketches placed around a studio filled with paintings, brushes, wine bottles and a chair. Two drawings of Picasso's "weeping women" appear on the right, and to the left splayed, ghostly limbs and a figure with raised arms haunt the work's 7-foot expanse. An open casement window provides the painted studio's interior light. Elwes's handling of light is expressed in passages of almost translucent color that appear to float in space. A tilted studio lamp on a rolling stand is rendered as the model for the Guernica lamp, turned to the horizontal. Light dappling the 4-by-5-foot Matisse's Bedroom (Nice, 1952) is dreamlike, infused with Elwes's painterly patches of color that seem to circle within the painting's field, like shadows cast by Matisse's dendritic cutout forms as they, too, dance around the room.

Elwes's faithfulness to the manner and style of his subjects is evident in his treatment of Warhol and Duchamp. He concentrates on Warhol's Factory (New York, 1964) and the production of the signature flowers Warhol showed with Leo Castelli that year. Elwes deploys the brightly hued paintings around the canvas's flattened plane in lieu of his own color patches, and captures Warhol's graphic style in all respects, including a reductive representation of studio furnishings. A canvas commemorating Warhors "silver factory" of 1967 shows the clutter of torn silver foil, silkscreened portrait multiples and bananas. Elwes goes furthest in service to Duchamp. A roughly 4-by-6-foot painting offers Duchamp's Studio (New York, c. 1918), furnished with the famous bicycle wheel, a chessboard and representations of the Large Glass distributed on a harlequin field of bright patches of color freely adapted from a grid laid down in a Duchamp drawing. Elwes crafted the spinning, 2-foot tondo Duchamp's Studio (New York, c. 1917) from a modern racing-bicycle wheel and patterned its surface with a representation of the Duchamp Roto-Relief. Scattered on the canvas's surface are small drawings of iconic Duchamp readymades: the shovel, the bottle racks, the urinal. A glimpse through a small opening in the surface reveals a movable gaming wheel, its many pockets altered to reference more or less familiar Duchamp images, including his photo-collage with a portrait by Man Ray pasted on the image of a roulette wheel.