There’s something both sweet and intense about “The Gilded Age,” a rather spellbinding self-portrait by Holden Willard at Alice Gauvin. It’s straightforward enough at first glance. Willard looks young and wispy-haired as he stands gazing straight at the viewer in his painting coveralls. The colors feel sunny, and the day glows with golden warmth.
But as we enter the painting, things get weird. From the house plant and view of the moon outside the window behind him, we sense we’re in an interior, yet grass and daisies carpet the ground. A picture of a bottle marked “XXX” emits some toxic red substance. A gramophone on a table strikes a bizarre note, a seemingly arbitrary artifact invented in 1877 that couldn’t possibly relate to Willard, who’s not yet even a quarter-century old. Next to it is a bottle of insulin with a syringe.
In a conversation with Willard at another show the next day, he told me he painted this after he landed in the hospital for radical weight loss that turned out to be serious diabetes. It’s the kind of work at which Willard excels. We feel his youth and innocence, particularly in a painting like the unabashedly nostalgic “Two Boys in a Canoe.” Yet we also feel that innocence evaporating even as we apprehend it, to be replaced by the sharper edges of adulthood.
The title “The Gilded Age” implies faded glory, something embalmed in memory. The creepily fulminating “XXX” potion suggests some malevolent force – tainted blood? Alcohol signaling some sort of crippling dependency or addiction? The indistinct object in his left hand could be a brush or a blade. Time is restless and pleasures fleeting in the best of Willard’s works.
His facility with paint and color is remarkably adept. The foreground of the “Two Boys in a Canoe” – depicting the surface of a lake – is awash with an incalculable array of colors and shading, palpably conveying water’s fluidity, reflective qualities, depth, incessant movement, as well as more solid objects atop it (water lily plants) and partially submerged in it (a birch branch).
[Excerpted from full review]