Flash Art, November December, 2003
Chris Doyle at Jessica Murray Projects

Chris Doyle is perhaps best known for his public art projects, including Commutable, for which he covered the Williamsburg Bridge steps in gold leaf, and LEAP, which projected leaping New Yorkers onto the facade of 2 Columbus Circle. In this exceptional exhibition, his second at the gallery, Doyle presents expertly rendered large-scale watercolors depicting everyday life at home and in the studio. These works exchange the isolation of his earlier watercolors, in which individual suburban houses were set adrift on vast expanses of white paper, for a warm-hearted take on the riches of family life. The colorful, controlled watercolors - ranging from three to six feet and occasionally grouped - document Doyle, his partner, and their daughter in a clear natural light whose softening of color lends itself to the medium. Threaded through the scenes is a gossamer strand of art historical references that permeate but do not burden Doyle's art.

Eva Triptych (all works 2003) looks from below at his nine-year-old daughter atop a ladder, arms outstretched as if in preparation of flight. Nestled between two depictions of the sky, her pose suggests the unbounded potential of youth while her luminous face and the atypical angle call to mind angels in Mannerist paintings. Eva is always lovingly rendered, whether in the center of Breakfast, which evokes The Last Supper, or in Plain Pleasures I, which also casts her as an angel, this time referencing Francesca Woodman. Doyle's studio is in his home, and he chooses to look at interstitial moments rather than grand acts of creation: the watercolors show him fiddling with a tangle of video cables and accidentally tumbling off a ladder. In the gallery, the installation emphasized a blurring of boundaries, casually juxtaposing the studio with the living room or bedroom.

Doyle's chronicle was made with a sly acknowledgement of the camera's mediation; most make use of a 4:3 aspect ratio, and cables and viewfinders find their way into almost every work. His earnest, reverential depiction of loved ones is paired with an acknowledgment of the inability to separate home from studio or family from history. Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that "all history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography." Doyle's exhibition demonstrates with a gentle touch that the two need not be mutually exclusive, instead presenting medium, subject, and historical reference as a deftly unified whole. – Brian Sholis

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