Alex da Corte, Texas, investigates to uncover the dark side of his buoyancy art

Most children entering Disney (mostly most children) usually revolve around the representatives of Disney princess. But when Alex Da Corte shot his first painting for the walls of a child’s bedroom at the age of 12, he portrayed the characters who competed with these princesses. Her evil stepmother is vaguely visible at night, rather than sleeping under Cinderella. A smiling Ursula seemed to appear from a nearby window. Ariel is nowhere to be found.

Da Corte is now in the mid-40s, but he is not more interested in Disney princess now than he was 30 years ago. Elsa the Snow Queen of the “Frozen” movie is the only Disney princess in his current investigation to appear in his current investigation. She’s in Time for killing (2016), a wall-mounted piece that also includes her cut cardboard, a faux bouquet with a knife, two mini disco balls and a Star Wars Storm Trooper Stande. This Elsa turned upside down and hung up the hanging, showing a frown smile.

It makes sense to frown because although the slats of this work are red and pink, Time for killing About the horrible thing: 49 people were killed in the 2016 Pulse shooting and 53 were injured in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Da Corte didn’t make it clear that the Holocaust was even hinting at it directly, which might just be the point. (Unless you read the wall text, you probably don’t know it’s about the subject either.) He seems fascinated by Elsa and the concept of many American pop culture symbols he works for, even when they seem happy and fun, he’ll be symbolizing something sinister.

Is Da Corte celebrating all this pop culture or criticizing it? I have no way of telling it out over the past decade. From the videos of camping, it’s usually hard to see him dressed as a monster in Frankenstein, Eminem and Mr Rogers. He was filled with large-scale installations of mod furniture and design items, such as the facilities that turned an entire New York building into a haunted house. and his large sculptures made with witch hats and houses. I started to write off Da Corte because the artist was more interested in the surface than the idea.

How wrong I am. The Fort Worth performance convinced me that while deliberately omitting anything the audience might find, Da Corte mimics how companies, film studios, record labels and media push some people away from the pictures so that we can never see them again. I realized that his work is about everything you can’t see because it’s not placed in front and in the middle.

take Ending (2017), a blurred rainbow cut into three pieces of print. Da Corte rainbowin which the arch of color jumped from the wall behind Kairi to her white vest. But the smiling pop star isn’t here, which makes this rainbow look sad. Carey Carey can be seen as a violent gesture, especially for queer artists, or, perhaps, a camping gesture, which is not to be too serious for people.

2021’s paintings are more explanatory The great disguiser One of the hands held a white hat surrounded by stars. Lily Tomlin’s hands once belonged to Lily Tomlin time The magazine wearing a white hat for some kind of material that the magazine did not mention her sexual identity at her request. Now, due to Tomlin’s absence, the painting becomes a statement made by the media about erasure (especially the strange erasure). Things we see in magazines time Usually just part of the picture.

In the investigation, called “Whale,” curator Alison Hearst has been following Da Corte’s painting exercises, part of his work. This seems odd, especially considering the fact that Dacorte said in the catalogue of the exhibition, “I don’t like the canvas. I don’t like the paint feeling on the canvas. It will kill me.” (It’s not an exaggeration: none of the 60 or so of his work assembled here is traditionally painted paintings.) However, the work in this show is long in clarifying the pathological flavor evoked in his well-known video installation.

The show found Da Corte repeatedly returning to Halloween and horror movies, which didn’t seem particularly interesting in the artist’s hands. The two earliest paintings in the show started in 2014 and contained images from the website’s advertising couple’s costume, partly showing a splendid bacon and egg two, and the other depicting a peanut butter and jelly sandwich combination. Their smiles seemed to be distorted due to the way Da Corte shattered this image. Title Namecheck both take Jeff Koons’ porn “Made in Heaven” and Michelangelo The final judgmentthese works are not only a bit evil.

Da Corte’s terror spirit is also in 2019 Constant fear (bumping at night)this is one of several upholstered works made of foam. In its seven panels, the work shows a broken Jack O’Lantern, leaving his smile incomplete and his internal organs exposed. At least another soft painting also hints at the Holocaust: anvil (2023) Remove the form of steel blocks that usually fall on the Wile E. Coyote.

Just like anvil It looks relaxed and pleasant. However, when omitting Wile E. Coyote, Da Corte seems to have a bit of a serious thought: the way some people are scrubbed and become invisible. So maybe this makes sense, among the only works here called self-portraits – the 2019 painting is called Triple Self-portrait (Study)the painter’s tools are glued to the cup – the artist has no representation at all. And, if you’re not sure if this is a political gesture, check it out Untitled protest sign (2021), where soft monochromatics appear as radical slogans, a gesture that seems to mimic the message of how those in power silence protesters.

The title of Da Corte’s self-portrait seems to refer to Norman Rockwell’s famous 1960 self-portrait, which shows that the artist has painted a self-portrait when peeking at the canvas and looking at himself in the mirror. Rockwell’s paintings brought a distinct American middle-class identity to many white surface suburban people in the post-war era, and Da Corte once said that his father was a Venezuelan immigrant and might have found the United States to be “hell” when it got there, crying as he might have imagined. The artist described trying to guide this view in his early works, and perhaps he did so Triple self-portraitAt first glance, this seems to be happy and then appears to be vacant when the extended viewing is made.

Triple self-portrait It can be seen as a negation of the beloved genre of painting, just as Dacott’s grant to popular culture is often negated in his own way. He even curated a large group of works from the Museum of Modern Art series for display. This part of the show focuses on the big white men in recent art history: an abstract by Frank Stella, a painting by Ed Ruscha, and a screen-print gun by Andy Warhol, a self-portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe and Francis Bacon. But, besides these works, Dacort also shows his subversion Mirror Marilyn (2022–23), of which Warhol’s Shooting the Saint Blue Marilyn is assigned and then printed backward.

Editing, deleting and deleting are common in Da Corte’s work on art history. eclipse (2021) Roy Lichtenstein’s improvisation I could see the whole room…no one inside! (1961), in which the words are drawn above a man passing through a peephole. But all we get in Da Corte’s view is the peephole itself, where no one can peek. While tracing the Whitney Museum retrospective for Lichtenstein, Da Corte depleted the pop artist’s work on meaning and then brought it new meaning through his title, suggesting that the yellow crescent seen here may represent the moon passing by before the sun.

But maybe it’s not that cynical. The solar eclipse temporarily leaves the world, allowing people to temporarily find new ways to observe. Perhaps this is exactly what Da Corte intends to relate to his entire eclipse, which requires viewers to imagine newcomers filling Lichtenstein’s empty rooms.