Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The phenomenon of the selfie, an artifact of the smart phone, is a supreme irony. The act itself suggests a narcissistic preoccupation with recording one’s presence, but its frequency and ubiquity indicates that it doesn’t matter much what person or place gets that honor. Warhol’s fleeting fifteen minutes is compressed into a pandering fraction of a second. I was here; please care. The only auto-photographers who really seem to get durably noticed are the Darwin Award winners whose acrobatic exertions towards drama topple them into the lethal maw of treacherous vistas. Lost in the scree of evanescent look-at-me images is the self in full social and political context, and it’s not in plain sight. There are few painters better suited for excavating it than David Humphrey, as he demonstrates in “porTraits,” his formidable solo exhibition now up at Fredericks & Freiser. Humphrey’s crowning gift – born of comprehensive technical and aesthetic command, a uniquely graphic allusive approach, sardonic wit, and an irrepressible narrative impulse – is to coordinate the nuances of disparate visual elements so finely as to render the busiest of paintings piercingly, disturbingly coherent.
