Press: Paul Mullins Pittsburgh Tribune Review
December 1, 2000

The Brute in Art
By Graham Shearing

No, I didn't see the movie "Fight Club," I'm afraid, and I have never been to a boxing match in my life. When a dust-up appears on the TV screen, I tend to change the channel. A case of avoidance, I'm sure. But at Michael Berger Gallery, you have two more days to see the work of Paul Mullins, a figure painter who is intensely preoccupied with the scenarios of boxing, wrestling and musclemen in all their macho bravura.

The exhibition is called "The Manly Art," and it sure ain't pretty, although Mullins points out that the "patterns of behavior" he refers to have been "increasingly capitalized on and exploited in advertising and marketing." It certainly is worth a visit, because Mullins' take on the subject is original and compelling.

He was brought up in West Virginia and now lives in Chicago, both places where toughness is a significant part of the local culture - a challenging mixture of brutalism and heroism. Violence is the embodiment of working-class masculinity, although happily not the only one, and in the hands of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer has been transformed into something more widely acceptable, drawing on primitive urges and needs.

Painters, too, have found inspiration in pugilism, and Berger cites the cases of George Bellows and George Luks at the beginning of the 20th century. The realism of the boxing ring is a forceful image of American dynamism. He also might have mentioned an earlier artist whose analysis of public violence and cruelty has never been bettered, William Hogarth. In the streets and asylums of early 18th century London, the brutish dysfunctionalism of society is expressed as an epic morality tale.

Mullins is not a history painter, but his portraits of run-down wrestlers and the like appear as small vignettes, or studies for such works, and are based on an acutely observed realism. The physiognomy of his subjects lacks any 18th-century classicism, instead drawing on contemporary ideas of figure painting. Berger correctly draws attention to the cases of Lucien Freud, Leo Kossoff and Jenny Saville, where the figure is densely worked in oil pigment. Mullins' figures undergo the same highly physical transformation, which is perhaps akin to wrestling itself. A series of portraits of "Has-Beens" is not so much marked with paint as bruised with it. In his largest work, huge, wobbly stomachs are not muscular but gone to fat. He paints not on canvas but on wooden panels, which enables him to assault the surface with obvious vigor and brutality. One is reminded of the photographic self-portraits by John Copal's of his own torso, which come across as diaries of a body.

These failed wrestlers are infinitely sad (one thinks not only of Lucien Freud, but also of Jean Antoine Watteau). They are sad not merely formally, but also because of the circumstances of their lives. Mullins combines with these sadnesses elements of the ridiculous. "Headlock," although a mixed media work, is essentially a drawing depicting a wrestler caught in that improbably painful clinch, but can as readily be interpreted as satire.

On another level Mullins' work is satisfying as pure painting and drawing. His techniques are wholly seductive and absorbing. The layering of paint, with many palimpsests, record the arduous processes of his art. His delicate (if unexpected) graphic line adds another dimension to the body of his work.