Prussian Blue: It's Not All About You

The recent New Museum exhibition "NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star" has launched a wave of multi-culti, identity-politics nostalgia that deserves a bracing antidote. That antidote exists, thank God, in a fantastic uptown painting exhibition at the Americas Society. If the first show carbon-dates our 20-year enactment of Freud's "narcissism of small differences" (from AIDS-era Benetton ads to Facebook's relentless adoration of self), the second reasserts art's enduring ability to address humanity's biggest traumas. In this case, it's painting about the mother of all art taboos, the Holocaust….

Of these, no artist has proved more consistently stubborn than Mexican-born painter Yishai Jusidman, who has lived for the past decade in Los Angeles. After nearly exploding his career on multiple occasions, the 49-year-old Jusidman has acquired an overblown but well-earned reputation as a "difficult artist" (full disclosure: I organized his 2009 career survey at Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno, and he was a jodido pain in el culo). A painter who shrugged off early popularity with fashionable curators—many misunderstood his cerebral pictures as mere critiques of painterly representation—Jusidman has since undertaken figurative work that re-establishes painting as a medium capable of wrestling with the thorniest questions. In his first New York solo exhibition in six years, he takes on a gamble worthy of the Cincinnati Kid: painting what artists have been told is simply beyond figuring.

Titled, a touch preciously, "Prussian Blue: Memory After Representation," Jusidman's ten acrylic-on-wood-panel and two acrylic-on-linen paintings offer startlingly ambiguous, silently evocative, confoundingly beautiful images of what was once, quite literally, hell on earth….

Click here to read the full review.