David Humphrey’s one-man show at Fredericks & Freiser, PorTraits, is made up of two bodies of work: in the front gallery are a suite of paintings from 2024, while in the back are less recent paintings, sculptures, and a work of video art, all of which the artist’s wife, Jennifer Coats, has selected to provide a more comprehensive conspectus of Humphrey’s oeuvre. The PorTraits press release notes that the exhibition’s title draws from the following query: “Are all artworks, in some way, self-portraits of their creators?” Although answering decisively in the affirmative would render the category of portraiture too generous to be of taxonomical use, the query proffers a substantive line of inquiry, which philosophers like Cynthia Freeland, Paolo Spinicci, and Hans Maes, alongside art historians like Shearer West, have recently analyzed. In Portraits and Persons: A Philosophical Inquiry (2010), Freeland convincingly makes the case that, unlike, say, CCTV images, portraits depict or represent both a “recognizable physical body” and “an inner life, i.e. some sort of character and/or psychological mental state.” Neither “all paintings” nor Humphrey’s works in particular satisfy the first condition—it is instead the second that undergirds Humphrey’s recent series.
Many of Humphrey’s works do, however, feature a human body, though the exact subject varies significantly. In Before the Chair (2024), Humphrey dispatches a cyan nude male body in contrapposto, the figure staring toward a floating aquamarine expanse. In Designer (2024), an outlined female body, poised like a sphinx atop a veiny tree stump, sets her jagged sights and toothy smile beyond the viewer’s gaze. In Rock Man (2024), the eponymous figure’s face, realistically rendered with a boyish bowl-cut and jagged cheeks, is but a decapitated totem squat atop cartoonish boulders and thickset upturned arms.
None of this sampling of works capture a singular likeness and the varied figures are hardly stylistically unified. Consequently, the precise nature of what tethers Humphrey’s work together or provides them with a unified “inner life,” seems, at first gloss, rather obscure. Surprisingly, it is Humphrey’s paintings devoid of any recognizable human figure that are most instructive. In Colored Drinks (2024), for instance, two background vitrines are populated by pairs of glass bottles. The bottles at bottom left, adorned with scarlet caps and wrappers, are reminiscent of Coca-Cola. Paneled in acidic chartreuse, the bottles immediately above them recall Fanta or Sprite. These variegated objects allude to the vernacular of Pop but, towards the center, the glass cases are overtaken by a gestural series of uneven charcoal strokes. The upper portion of this vague conglomeration is delineated by an ovular curve that lapses into a triangular form below; from its sides slip two wavering lines and the faint bow of a bosom. These vacillating shapes commingle, giving the faint impression of a figure suggestively splayed across the glass receptacle.
This vague figure, a semi-diaphanous amassment of strokes, reoccurs throughout Humphrey’s works. In Luggage (2024), an array of suitcases and trunks are arranged on a livid linoleum floor. Above, a coagulation of thick powdered pearl strokes are corralled into a collapsed and upended figure. Two smirched beady eyes and a cragged smile lapse into the floor, the figure’s sinking frame anatomically distilled into outsized protruding limbs. To its left is an empty black doorway and a chestnut brown wall. Here we begin to understand what it is that unifies Humphrey’s series: the artist has a ready penchant for this stroke-based configuration of appendages, often off-center, off-kilter, and delineated in sharp shard-like panels. Given their interwoven limbs and torso-like forms, these gestural configurations are set into a complementary relationship with those works populated by more immediately recognizable human subjects. In Plant Thoughts (2024), Humphrey makes this parallel concrete, juxtaposing a pixelated pallid boy with a stroke-based amassment.
When considered together with his more concretely figurative imagery, Humphrey’s recurrent protean form suggests the haze of a human reduced to mere suggestion—disjointed, amorphous, embryonic. In a telling remark made during a 2016 artcritical.com roundtable, Humphrey betrays his admiration for Philip Guston. He stresses his appreciation for how “Guston articulates and celebrates incipience, the potential for a thing to come into being”, underscoring “[t]he blunt forms that … become books, canvases, shoes or heads … and often slip back into undifferentiated muck.” Humphrey continues, explaining: “I love the determined contingency of all of them, as though each decision was a response to the question ‘what if?’” In Humphrey’s recent works, Guston’s “blunt forms” are, more often than not, compiled into a shard- or stroke-based amassment of fragments, nascent humanity stunted into sheer becoming. These “contingent” forms are brought into relation with subjects and environs that are more clearly identifiable, thereby proposing the skeletal structure of a narrative. Yet where Guston emphasized narrative, Humphrey dissolves the connected pictorial structure into less articulate pictorial chains. Beings are posited beside structures, but their exact relationship remains unresolved.
Although Humphrey provides no narrative synthesis, in his 2024 paintings there is a clear interest in the human form rendered as contingent “incipience.” Humphrey’s recent series, like his past work, stylistically hews towards pluralism, unencumbered by the reign of any dominant mode. Yet, given his recurrent leitmotif, he refuses genuinely postmodern pluralism, according to which there can be no controlling narrative that undergirds art history. If postmodern pluralism embraces both stylistic and thematic heterogeneity, refusing any grand or orientational narrative whatsoever, Humphrey’s recent work cannot fit under that rubric. By folding various styles into a sustained concern with the human form, Humphrey suggests that painting is—however elliptically—about the human and, by extension, the artist. This is also why, despite the fact that his paintings are not portraits proper, Humphrey remains concerned with the genre. For though Humphrey outright refuses straightforward storytelling and complete metaphors, in his turn to the figure, he resolutely identifies the ambit of painting with the artist projecting their inherently human form to the canvas, however nascently or contingently it might manifest.