WRITING : 2004 : RICHARD HAWKINS
Set in a disconcerting underworld club—or "boyquarium"—where androgynous figures compete for attention, Richard Hawkins's new paintings (all 2004) emerge from his abstractions of recent years and reiterate his mid-1990s works in which magazine images of glam rockers were collaged onto felt banners or paper-clipped to creepy, sliced-up Halloween masks. Following slyly from the earlier collages, the new paintings are less composed than cropped: Space imposes heavily on each figure, either crushing them—in Closing Time 2, for example—or dismembering them, so the viewer can lavish attention on constituent parts (fingers, toes, pot bellies, knobby knees, manboobs) and their sometimes awkward relationship to the whole body. Tanlines demarcate overcooked pink flesh from ghostly white skin dressed up with blue and green shadows. Is contestant #31 in Passing Pageant shirtless and sunburned, or is s/he wearing a snug wifebeater with nipples painted on the outside? Gender ambiguity is folded into painterly ambiguity as the assumed threshold between "abstraction" and "representation" vanishes. Options, Not Solutions is a fitting title for a painting in which three oddball figures compete with raucous stripes and checkerboard patterns. In the background, a small painting hangs on a wall decorated with garish diagonal lines: This painting-within-a-painting is a shorthand landscape, or perhaps just an accumulation of horizontal green brushstrokes. Such ambiguity is the "solution" that energizes this exhibition.
Artforum.com, November 26, 2004