Adam Linn

Fascinator

On first glance, Adam Linn’s extraordinary paintings afford luminous close-ups of things we often lose sight of due to their ordinariness: keyholes, doorknobs, high-heeled shoes, toilet seats, and runny sinks. But in Fascinator, each artwork meditates on the dynamism inherent in seemingly static things, things captured as if undergoing changes that Linn’s pencil and brush work manifest into view. In his works, newly energized phenomena emerge, hallucinatorily adored by Linn’s eye and hand and vibrating with an animacy somewhere between persons and things. Bereft of their stark utility and functionality in the world, they now brim with color, fluidity, elasticity and, of course, sex. Linn’s compositions are thus about things that cruise us by surprise, as opposed to lying in wait for spectators to find them. Indeed, his images petition to be felt, seen, and caressed; they thrust up and at viewers as unknown and unanticipated solicitations, originating out of an imaginary (and erotic) nothingness.

Linn’s compositions have various aesthetic fellow travelers. For example, they subtly reference the world of Wanda Gág, where objects and their environments take on cartoonishly exaggerated powers. But they also signal the detailed reverence of Domenico Gnoli’s paintings, where a button or a hairline is lavished attention as if to bring out a point of contemplation. In other instances, something of Deborah Remington’s hard edged dark saturations flood Linn’s work, such as in “Vivid Sud” where an overflowing faucet radiates out thick, lavender spillages that transform into amorphous shapes dwarfing the bathroom sink. This work is an example of how Linn thinks about issues of materiality: what counts as fluid and hard, soft or dense in a painting? Water can be as thing-like as a faucet, just as a color or a line can be an erect entity of its own. In “Fixations,” which is an interpretation of the mezzotint entitled “Cuddlers,” Linn depicts two shining door handles that cradle each other with a glowing liquid richness, as if transmuting them out of static objecthood and into colored, wet force. While these are things that exist in the world, Linn suggests that by looking more closely, different forms and energies appear out of these everyday objects. Indeed, it is this which makes them particularly queer in Linn’s aesthetic: out of place in defined normative spaces, Linn rearranges the environments from another point of view. Subtly reminiscent of Félix González-Torres’ “Untitled (Perfect Lovers),” which shows two identical clocks mounted side by side, at once doubling but also different from each other, “Fixations” pays homage to the (homo)sameness of these objects while also exploding their identities by giving “a special peek inside of something” (Linn), turning them inside out. In “Docking Procedure,” the doorknobs return but are this time positioned athwart each other, their color and shape pulled over or literally docked over the other as if in a shared, sexy embrace. And in “Metalmouth,” the interior fascinator of the handle mechanism sneakily suggests a sexy detail of inner stimulation, connection, and detachment.

Throughout the paintings in Fascinator, there is no interiority or inner life; everything is beautifully external, inhuman, and lusciously material. It fascinates. And if the titles of Linn’s paintings often hint at human intimacies, what he is really after is an intimacy between things and for things. In other words: these are not things interpersonally made for us to hold and use, but rather things existing and mingling with each other—an anonymous tenderness of things that have no need for us, but are also a part of this world. Linn’s works powerfully reflect on how to begin tilting our view to see otherwise.

—Jacques Khalip