Unreal Gregory Gillespie’s deceptive art BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

There’s a caged animal in almost every Gregory Gillespie painting in the Fogg Museum’s "Life As Art: Paintings by Gregory Gillespie and Frances Cohen Gillespie." That animal is Gillespie himself. The show is a study in his evolving self-regard: nine of his 17 paintings center on the artist’s own face. And each of those self-portraits reads as though its subject were on display in a human zoo. There are, typically, no real backgrounds, no real activities. The communication between viewer and viewed is predicated on captivity, on an unbridgeable divide. The viewer takes control for granted; the face we look at takes his entrapment for granted.

I’ve been paying attention to Gregory Gillespie’s work for some time (he died, a suicide, three years ago), and it wasn’t until this show that I began to make sense of the voluptuous, articulate, enticing vegetables and fruit that constitute his still lifes and populate his self-portraits. For all their clarity and richness, for all that Gillespie’s compositional sense makes his pears and oranges, his eggplants and squash seem like jewels in Tiffany settings, I realize I’ve always been nagged by a sense of some underlying tension, something unresolved and remote. What ought to satisfy somehow doesn’t; what ought to excite ends up merely tantalizing, which over time becomes unsettling. Why?

In Studio: Still Life (1978), a green acorn squash sits on a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. It’s positioned at six o’clock among an array of objects that fan out like numbers on a clock face; another squash, this one a butternut, leans against an upright log on the same tablecloth at roughly seven o’clock. When you consider what else competes for your attention in this compelling, complex work — three rough, tribal-like masks, five naked bodies (look hard), and three portraits (the artist, his wife, who’s easily mistaken for a boy, and a mannequin) among other things — what’s most amazing is the central role the butternut squash plays. Three sizable and realistically rendered Caucasian faces occupy Studio: Still Life, and yet it’s the gold rind of the butternut squash that comes across as the most genuine flesh. Gillespie’s self-portrait at nine o’clock — fleeting, inquisitive, absorbing — seems to have had half its brushstrokes left out. Mottled by red daubs, it looks as if it were in the act of melting. Gillespie’s wife, Frances Cohen Gillespie, appears at three o’clock; she looks as frozen in time as a Pompeii fresco, and her skin grows so pale beneath her neck, she almost evaporates. In the same vein, the bust of the armless, hairless, nippleless mannequin at four o’clock — for all that her mouth and her eyes look troublingly human — appears as an unambiguous imitation of the corporeal.

Only the bulbous, tumescent, phallic, luminous, common butternut squash looks palpable and real. Its skin is neither breaking apart nor vaporous nor lacking articulation. Its surface dances with highlights and shaded gradations; its textures range from the glassy smoothness of its neck to the coarse crenellations of its stem. It’s the only object of the six on the table that makes the tablecloth crease. It doesn’t appear painted within the frame so much as imported from the garden. And indeed, it was imported — not from the garden, but from a different painted surface altogether. The distinctness of the butternut squash can be attributed in part to the fact that it’s been fitted, puzzle-like, into the surface of the larger frame. Gillespie regularly embedded cut-outs; stand close to Studio: Still Life and you see that not only was the butternut squash imported but so too were the portraits of the Gillespies as well as the shelf in the upper quadrant. The distinctness of various elements’ contours is related to their having been brought in from the outside, yet only when you’re up next to the painting can you see where it’s been incised.

It would be easy to start riffing on the symbolism of the squash in Studio: Still Life — how its stem points in the direction of the artist, how its pear shape suggests both female and male (in his full-bodied self-portraits, Gillespie often appears with a woman’s hips and shoulders). Yet what strikes me as the most riveting thing about Studio: Still Life — beyond the three haunting portraits, beyond its subtle physical manipulations, beyond the antic, Bosch-like bodies and the homy kitchen table and the grotesque masks — is the way the squash pulls at your eyes. Its precision, its brightness, its pure delectability dwarf the rest. It’s more alive than the artist or his wife or the room in their home and the objects they’ve acquired to fill it. And it’s dead.

Smoldering unhappiness, lifelessness where there ought to be vitality, stalk Gillespie’s frames and make a serious, protracted study of his work a test of one’s own fortitude. I knew Gregory Gillespie only briefly near the end of his life; he was both handsome and attractive, open and engaging. Yet to see his self-portraits is to see someone else entirely, or many someone elses. They’re connected to one another by a common thread of emotional and spiritual incarceration. Gillespie’s is the hopelessness and the strength of the big cat behind bars. Everything that ought to be pleasurable — food, sex, movement, acclaim — is tinged with defeat.

Perhaps that defeat is nowhere better appreciated than in his regard for his own body. Shirtless (as he was mercilessly wont to depict himself), Gillespie’s torso looks as pale and flaccid as a worn towel. The lack of muscle tone itself seems an exaggeration. For Gillespie, the body, like every other object he painted, must be understood as a metaphor. His goal was always the drama of his own experience; for all their exactitude, his paintings are dreams, not documentaries, and his idiosyncratic realism is placed in the service of his apparently infrequent pleasure and recurrent pain.

To understand that the body he painted was more fictive than "real," more about an argument he was making in oil than about a fact he meant to convey, you might observe that though his body weight shifts little, his proportions were always up for grabs. Consider the difference between his 1978 self-portrait and the one that dates from 1985. In the former, Gillespie portrays himself as a bearded, narrow-shouldered man whose head is oversized to the point of qualifying as hydrocephalic. Seven years later, the T shirt’s off and in its place a milky-white pattern looks stamped where the flesh not exposed to the sun sags like wet laundry. The neck has grown thin and elongated, and the artist’s head now seems too small for the same body. Was the "real" Gregory Gillespie the angry hulk of Self Portrait in Black Shirt (1969) or the emaciated junkie-like figure in Self Portrait on Bed (1973–’74)? Is he the brooding hydrocephalic of 1978 or the befuddled microcephalic of 1985? The answer is yes, all of the above. Gillespie’s truth is never literal.

His treatment of his own body hair also delivers a sense of his being a caged beast. In Self Portrait in Studio (1976–’77), he’s clean shaven and short-haired. Otherwise, he’s prone to sport bushy mustaches, prominent eyebrows, chin stubble, beard, and unruly, abundant, sometimes shoulder-length hair. It’s not the amount of hair that makes him look like a trapped animal but its appearance. In Smiling Self Portrait (1983), his hair appears to have become a thin, dark gauze that spreads from his lips and chin and scalp to envelop everything in the frame: his sweater, his forehead, his temples, even his teeth look blanketed in hair.

"Life As Art" also includes eight large oil paints by Gillespie’s first wife, Frances Cohen Gillespie, who died in 1998. Oversized cut flowers on ornately patterned bolts of cloth appear as decorous eruptions of color and form in her paintings. They are, however, oddly without texture. The smooth, pliable petals of her chrysanthemums read as if they were identical to the touch as the cushiony velvet of her gloxinia blossoms. The leonine skin of her amaryllis is rendered as though it delivered the same feel as the waxy spikes of her birds of paradise. By comparison with the works of her first husband — and the small confines of the exhibit make it difficult not to compare — her paintings seem facile, almost complacent.

Fortunately, there’s more of Gregory Gillespie to be seen. "Demons and Paradise" at the Nielsen Gallery offers up a whole other set of the artist’s self-portraits and tableaux, including his undated Sculpture Relief Stick Box, which may qualify as his most outrageous and chilling work.