Contributed by Margaret McCann / Celeste Dupuy-Spencer (1979–2026) left too soon, but her candid, cynical expressions of Americana, angst, and injustice leave a powerful legacy. The poetically titled exhibition “Burning in the Eyes of the Maker” (Daniel Lanois lyrics) at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery has less of her colorful work. Even without the great Don’t You See That I Am Burning depicting January 6, the Trump zeitgeist is uncomfortably conjured and conjoined with (by the show’s timing and location) September 11 imagery. In the untitled painting above, nature is a wasteland through which Georg Baselitz’s itinerants, or the struggling painter, might stumble. “For me to paint,” Dupuy-Spencer admitted, “loneliness helps. Real, abject … a gaping maw.” An acrid yellow horizon yawns uneasily in the vast space. Like an unfinished painting, an inscrutable bas-relief gripped by giant hands withholds meaning from the lonely climber. White-collared, lost as the protagonist of the film Falling Down, he looks abandoned by past and future, like the exiled Dante. Disorientation replaces the faith guiding Friedrich’s wanderer, Coleridge’s optimist, Walt Whitman’s roamer.
