TRAVIS COLLINSON'S EMOTIONAL DISTRESS SUCKS US IN
by Kenneth Baker
San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, August 13, 2011

The complexities of contemporary art make it difficult to distinguish a vision - something quite rare - from a manner. The work of Travis Collinson at Baer Ridgway offers a test case.

Anyone familiar with the late Lucian Freud's portraits from around 1950 will recognize them as a source for Collinson's pictures. To leave such a conspicuous influence so exposed, as the young Freud did in echoes of his predecessor Stanley Spencer (1891-1959), takes exceptional confidence and the ability to back it up.

Collinson's portrait "Rutso" (2011) describes a woman slumped on a gray sofa, her mien halfway between deliberate pose and failure to conceal annoyance at being fixed by a likeness.

She has the oddly enlarged head and face of Freud's more stylized early portrait subjects and pools of ambiguous emotion for eyes. The picture's view sights down on her, as if from the ceiling, and the slope of her figure appears to warp the whole image space.

As in most of Collinson's pieces, not merely the caricatural qualities but the whole space expresses an emotional discomfort. We cannot tell whether the anxiety evoked belongs to the subject, to the artist himself or both. In any case, we catch it like a cold.

As many of Freud's early pictures exhale the bleak psychic air of postwar London, Collinson's describe the emotional overcast under which our lives move now. Odd incidents punctuate a Collinson painting such as "Upsidedown" (2007-10), but the source of disquiet in most of his work appears to lie outside it, as he hints by means of the abstracted gaze in his masterly untitled chalk self-portraits. Picturing him supine on leaf-strewn ground, these chalk drawings incidentally merge portrait, still life and landscape. They also highlight drawing skill as the foundation of Collinson's art

Freud's early work looks back to sources in Northern Renaissance painting and graphic arts, with their reverent attention to the material world's details. Collinson also suggests - but faintly in a depleted still life such as "Basil" (2008-11) - a sort of refuge from vulnerable subjectivity in scrutiny of the apparent.

Collinson's most recent pictures gesture toward other sources in art history, such as Goya, Morandi and Brice Marden. He even sneaks in a reference to Donald Judd. Such allusions, no matter how submerged, might make Collinson's work seem academic were it not so genuinely felt and passionately realized.