Nat MeadeThe Wait

Fall Exhibitions October 6 through December 16, 2017

Nat Meade Eater, 2017 Oil on linen15 x 12 inches

Courtesy of Froelick Gallery, Portland

Nat Meade Smoker/Cryer, 2016

Casein on paper 8.75 x 6.25 inches

Courtesy of Froelick Gallery, Portland

DADDY FUGEOne of my summer jobs in college, in 1973, was plagiarizing

the news from my hometown newspaper and writing it up for a T.V. broadcast every night. While I was working, my boss would be fielding calls from creditors while his wife typed up his spy novel. When I went back to school, it was reported that he was a Soviet agent. While he had worked for a Mississippi senator, he had access to top military secrets and sold them to the Russians. Breaking news the next day, however, claimed he was really a double agent—working for us. The Senator was off the hook, and my boss soon left town. It was the time of Watergate.

He looked not unlike some of the nondescript men that Nat Meade portrays in his recent series of exquisitely compressed, small-scale paintings: close-up faces of middle-aged men. They are ordinary-looking guys: the Scout Master you once looked up to, the chemistry teacher who gave you a C, the radio DJ who lived in the past. They resemble Mr. Potato Head—car-toon-like, with beaked noses and black beads for eyes—but they are imbued with a poignant human presence. And Meade, born in 1975, gives them a retro 70’s touch—big squared-off tinted sunglasses, as though our hero had a streak of style and decided to be cool. Cool or uncool, nerdy or resigned, they are not as tragic as Willy Loman, but they do feel lonely and sad, hiding behind their thick, manly beards. Nobody seems to care about them anymore, not their grown kids or several ex-wives. Sometimes they are crying, their deadpan tears a testament to how forgotten they feel.

Their pathos rises to an apocalyptic level in the few paint-ings where Everyman becomes God, or Moses, or Noah: a long-haired, bearded patriarch straight out of the Bible. In one painting, two of them are seen with their heads close together like carved twin monuments. Others have gaping mouths from which seep empty, upside-down thought balloons, like rivers

Nat Meade Last Meal, 2017

Casein on paper9.5 x 6.25 inches

Courtesy of Froelick Gallery, Portland

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Nat Meade Drown, 2017 Casein on paper10 x 6.75 inches

Courtesy of Froelick Gallery, Portland

that seem to be drowning them. One open mouth approaches a Munch-like scream. In another painting, the hole of a mouth exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke is like a dark cave ready for Plato and Freud.

The space around the figures is abstract; an un-delineated context rendered in unnatural color and geometric planes. Meade has eschewed the deeper, cinematic space of earlier paintings for a close up, allegorical space with cinematic light and a concentrated mood. He contemplates the sins of the fathers with a dark sense of humor, realizing he is a father him-self now hitting middle age.

The paintings, with their perfect tension between high and low, are informed by some choice precursors that include the eerie carnival figures of Ensor and the circus portraits of Kuhn; the abstracted heads of Jawlensky and the isolated figures of Hopper; the existential vortex of George Tooker and the per-verse frozen stillness of Balthus. One painting approaches the noirish horror of David Lynch: a dwarf lifted from Disney has bitten into a log. No, wait, that’s not a log—it’s someone’s sawed-off arm.

ALLEN FRAME

ON THE COVER:

Nat Meade Head Shadow, 2016 Casein on paper 10 x 8.5 inches

Courtesy of Froelick Gallery, Portland

Open Monday through Saturday,10:00 AM to 4:00 PM

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FROELICK GALLERY