November 7, 2023
By Vittoria Benzine
One exhibition about partying is a statement. Two is a coincidence. Three makes a trend. There’s at least that many solo shows centered around disco balls and revelry on view this week across Lower Manhattan: “Party Time” by Ridgewood-based Carlo D’Anselmi at Thierry Goldberg Gallery, “Alter Ego” by Greenpoint-based Sanié Bokhari at KAPOW, and “Energy Broth” by Chinatown-based Maggie Ellis at Charles Moffett. Each exhibition marks an apotheosis within its respective artist’s practice thus far, together coalescing and harmonizing at a portent moment where the global north is really contending with whether our previous methods of functioning are amenable any longer.
All three artists were born in 1991. They were all 20 in 2011, when Britney Spears sang about dancing until the world ends and LMFAO apologized for party rocking. I don’t know if these moments were as important for these painters as they were for me, but that music’s popularity belies even more to me now than before a culture slamming Smirnoff to take the edge off, a generation starting out on the heels of a financial crisis, America’s shameful reaction to 9/11, and a swelling climate crisis. For starters. Absolutely nothing has cooled off since. Perhaps taking the edge off did not in fact solve the problem. Since then, maybe it’s gotten too real too fast, maybe the wellness girlies won, but one thing’s for sure. Fluorescents are done. The 2010s killed them. I heard theories in 2022 that the pandemic would spur another roaring twenties. Instead, inflation has skyrocketed. People are staying home. Very few in the mood. Not saying anyone should be.
Since I met Carlo D’Anselmi in April last year, his paintings have evolved from focusing on singular figures to svelte sets of them, and now, with “Party Time,” entire raging scenes. “Now, on our Nth wave of introspective figurative painting, I really started to feel bored or tired by it,” D’Anselmi told me. “I wanted my works to focus on things that weren’t about *me*. So i began to want the occupants of my paintings to get together with each other and party and have some fun.” Canvases throughout the show depict an imaginative series of parties, from an apt Halloween gathering to a fictional scene where NASA sky trackers surrender to a last minute bacchanal before a celestial body smashes Earth. There’s even shudder shades in here. Elsewhere, D’Anselmi is more pensive — his recently deceased family dog smiles from the shadow of a girl dancing beneath a disco ball all by herself. Still, the artist refrains from taking himself so seriously. That looseness enables D’Anselmi’s archetypal wisdom to shine through his simultaneously playful, intellectual paintings.
