RICHARD HAWKINS

“Pleasure—undiluted essence of pleasure—is a suspect commodity in modern art,” John Ashbery wrote of Bonnard’s bruised reputation, for coming too late and being too decorative. Bonnard made his vibratory pictures well into the 1940s, and was faulted for embracing mere ornament against the yardstick of Cubism’s rigor or abstraction’s reserve. Hawkins, for his part, slyly perverts what was latent in his sources: ripe produce splayed on Bonnard’s tabletops are rechristened Fruits; an all-male boating party from 1924 becomes the backdrop for All Hands on D*ck. That maritime scene is overlaid with enlarged heads pulled from Hawkins’s personal pantheon: Mike Faist hovers over the sail like an aegis, his bared nipples colored with an ardent realism, resting atop a field of white dabs laid on with a palette knife, like a Ryman.

Hawkins refers to such passages in his paintings as “captivation traps”—bits of heightened detail amidst the laxer brushwork that snare the viewer’s attention. Throughout, he draws energy from the distortions and oddities baked into the Bonnard originals: the skewed sightlines that intensify a theater of objects, the figures and edges left unresolved. Each kink pastoral or still life is a “faulty, poetic translation,” as Hawkins puts it, taking liberties (swapping hues and shifting perspectives) that feel sanctioned by Bonnard’s example. These new paintings thus belong to what TJ Clark calls “the Bonnard strand” of modernism, one that depends on revelry and heedless formal invention as tonic for dark times—an art “dedicated to the proposition that the only hope, in a corrupt and invasive culture, is to put one’s trust in the realm of the senses, and expose oneself—naively, almost idiotically—to the play of light.”