By Philippa Snow

Throughout his practice, the Los Angeles-based artist Jan Gatewood has muddled the boundaries between drawing and painting with a textured application of media, blending organic processes and substances with inorganic ones: he applies elements like bleach, lemon juice, Palo Santo ash, glue and salt, and the chemical reactions that ensue give each work a sense of
activation—that of a controlled experiment in turning matter into meaning. In a new body of work, he uses such techniques to explore the relationship between beauty and commerce, through representations of historic and contemporary figures. One such figure is Barbara Stanwyck, the Golden Age actress who was at one time the highest-paid woman in Hollywood. Beauty standards, like fine art trends, evolve over time; so, too, do our opinions about relevance and meaning. Stanwyck’s status as a star in an era when movie posters were the domain of illustrators means that her face has been repeated as an image many times, and drawn by many different hands. In this sense, she becomes an abstracted symbol of all-American beauty via which Gatewood is able to interrogate ideas around the reproduction of pre-existing likenesses
and labour in art.

Immediately beneath Stanwyck, Gatewood has rendered Br’er Rabbit, the leporine trickster character from African-American oral tradition who often appears in his work. The juxtaposition suggests an observation about the history of American storytelling. Fame is for now, or for a few generations; fables and folk legends are passed on for centuries. Ultimately, all these things come together to define our complex conceptions of aesthetic value, and to dictate which figures and signifiers achieve immortality. Elsewhere, Gatewood portrays Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved by former US President Thomas Jefferson. Since no photographic image of Hemings exists, she has only ever been depicted by artists, in a subtly altering series that has something in common with the movie-poster repetitions of faces like Stanwyck’s. Gatewood continues this lineage, adding a lamb—a touch of symbolic softness for a woman who was treated, in life, like an object. Given his decision never to use brushes, but to work with his own hair and fingers, or with ad hoc tools such as Q-Tips, it is quite often possible to see Gatewood’s touch in the finished result, and this sense of presence furthers his connection with his audience, as well as adding an additional emotional dimension to the work. Beauty is a double-edged blade; it can be both a catalyst for stardom, and an excuse for exploitation by sinister forces of authority.

As an artist, Gatewood balances social or political messaging with a consistently sharp wit: note the bottles of anti-ageing GHK-Cu Peptide slotted into the chair in the sculpture Smoke Signals, which nod both to the eternal pursuit of youth and beauty in the culture at large, and to the art world’s obsession with these qualities. The teddy-bear that makes up the rest of the artwork is printed with an iPhone screenshot from the Instagram account of the musician Offset, in which he stands next to a work by Jordan Wolfson at a previous iteration of Frieze: an ouroborotic picture, drawing focus not only to the reframing of art as a luxury good, but also the status of art fairs themselves as recursive, image-focused marketing displays, not unlike advertising or
celebrity coverage. That this screenshot appears as a second-hand pattern on the body of a bear underscores the degree to which this flattening of art and commerce is broadly viewed as palatable, even cuddly, in the present moment. Gatewood is intrigued by the collapsing together of visual material in the age of the internet, and by the way that this coalescence produces images of multi-layered significance. In one new work, he reproduces one of the hares that recur in the practice of the c.1700s Dutch artist Jan Weenix. In another, he applies the same approach to a frog—one of his own recurring symbols. A third artwork features the artist’s own likeness, presented similarly to his portraits of Stanwyck and Hemings. Such parallels are in service of recognising Western art history as a shared structural discipline; they are also acknowledgements of the degree to which artists’ success can be determined by their adherence to art historical guidelines.