DAVID WEBSTER
From the Renaissance until the beginning of the modern era, the human body was a central focus of Western painting and sculpture. Artists studied anatomy, worked from live and dead models, and vied with each other in an effort to create convincingly realistic representations of the human form. David Webster is equally fascinated by the human body, but he starts from the inside out, creating witty formalist abstractions and playful postmodernist sculptures which have their basis in his interest in histology, the microscopic study of plant and animal tissues. While his works frequently have an organic quality, without the titles one might not guess that they were based on x-rays, microscopic enlargements of cell structures, or medical textbook illustrations of such catastrophic “events” as heart attacks or cerebral hemorrhages. But since Webster is first and foremost an artist, rather than a scientist, he feels free to alter and reinvent these raw materials for his own aesthetic ends. Thus, in “Digesting Bacon”, a recreation of the digestive system painted in a velvety Yves Klein blue lies in a tangle on a minimalist shelf. It is vaguely exotic, suggesting at once an Oriental odalesque and a convoluted hookah. The end points of the system, the mouth and the anus, are coated in gold, enhancing this impression. The title is a play on the digestive system’s biological purpose and the English artist Francis Bacon, so famous for his paintings of screaming open mouths. The digestive system stars again in “Acid Indigestion” where it is drawn as a large spiral. The image is “drawn” on mylar with carefully controlled burn marks which give it a mysterious smoky quality. The end of the spiral is extended with a tail of tiny handwritten words culled from a text about acid indigestion which trails off into a rambling discourse on the origins and remedies for ulcers. Transformed into a spiral, an internal system little mentioned in polite company becomes one with the image of infinity. In other works cells begin to suggest heavenly bodies, cosmic disturbances, landscapes and formalist stripe paintings. A painting inspired by the cellular structure of hypertension presents a whirl pattern that brings to mind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” while another cell based painting resembles Monet’s “Water Lilies”. The line between science and art evaporates as medical illustrations morph into formalist paintings. In the end, Webster’s reimagining of human physiology serves as a reminder that, as the artist notes, “The universe can be found within ourselves”. All nature is akin and we are inextricably linked to both the smallest cell and the largest star. Eleanor Heartney New York City 2002