Vanitas Baby - Susannah Bettag
Debut solo exhibition of color saturated paintings by San Francisco artist plays on tensions between women's eroticism and the dangers and discoveries of childhood innocence

'Drowning Without You' will feature thousands of dolls named "Little Boo" descending from the ceiling in a massive 14 foot swarm-like installation

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. Frey Norris Gallery is pleased to present, "Vanitas Baby," the debut solo exhibition for San Francisco artist Susannah Bettag, opening Thursday, February 1 and continuing through March 14, 2007.

Vanitas refers to the early tradition of 17th century Dutch still-life paintings that used symbols to depict the transitory nature of human life and serve as a moralizing message on the ephemerality of sensory pleasures. For "Vanitas Baby," Bettag adapted her own symbols and vernacular (her invented character "Little Boo", women-only pornography, domestic appliances, plants and spores, virus-like formations) and appropriated traditional symbols to reinvest meaning in this Old Master motif. Vanitas paintings often depicted beautiful and sumptuous still-life scenes, they always contained some reference to man's mortality, often by including a skull, but also with rotten fruit, dying flowers, watches, hourglasses, smoke, bubbles and musical instruments.

"As with my paintings, I liked all the different layers of meaning that could be pulled from the name, 'Vanitas' (vanity and shallowness, temporality and mortality) adding 'Baby' made it fresh and cheeky."

The intricate detail in Bettag's paintings echoes the chaos of her internal musings, and in their complexity and obsessiveness reference the high level of detail and craft of traditional women's art (e.g. the sampler, the quilt, the needlepoint). Bettag elaborates, "I am intrigued and awed by obsessive behavior in the creation of art. I am inspired by traditional women's craft like needlepoint and quilting that is very small-scale, detailed and labor-intensive requiring a focus that borders on the obsessive."

Bettag's organic process involves multiple layers that evolve into a cornucopia of texture and detail. Starting with color studies and a basic sketch taken from pornography, she marks up a transparency film to line-up various layers of the painting. Layers of meaning, just like layers of identity, literally lay one over the other, and as Bettag's work matures, the depth and complexity of this layering grows staggering, without ever sacrificing humor or genuine sexual desire. The use of strong, complementary colors provides a bold and appealing foundation and prevents the layers from collapsing into an incomprehensible mess.

A love of color informs Bettag's work and she is quick to note her influences. "I just went to the Howard Hodgkin's retrospective at the Tate Britain in London. I have always been a fan, but seeing all his work in the flesh I was transfixed. His use of color is just amazing - rich, deep, glowing and brave."

"My paintings are intended to be exquisite objects, ones that initially at least give the viewer a visceral sense of pleasure, primarily through color. They are full of contrasts, built up of layers that both hide and highlight."<

Bettag's previous work, "Internal Workings," "Dirty Little Secrets" and "Women's Work," featured pornographic silhouettes adorned with a tiny cartoon character Bettag has dubbed, "Little Boo" as well as common symbols of domesticity and violence. Modern Japanese artists, as well as traditional Japanese woodcuts and ink paintings and contemporary calligraphy influence Bettag's work. Techniques are sometimes borrowed from the classic Japanese style, "ukiyo-e," literally "floating world," including the use of a crisp pictorial line and flat color and the flat but fluid renderings of three-dimensional objects. These are blended with the modern juxtapositions of cute and violent, or sweet and crazy imagery from Anime cartoons. "My character, Little Boo, most certainly has distant, or maybe not so distant, Japanese cousins," comments Bettag.<

<b>About the Art</b><br> "Vanitas Baby" centers on a massive installation reaching from the gallery floor to the ceiling over twenty feet above. "Drowning without You" features Bettag's cartoon-like character, "Little Boo" which has been sculpted and manufactured en-masse in matte white vinyl. Thousands of "Little Boos" will descend from the ceiling in a massive, swarm-like installation.

Large-scale portraits: "The initial inspiration was to contrast my friends beautiful faces, caught in a happy moment, painted delicately and gently, with the plastic porn girls, who all seem to look exactly the same and share the same small range of facial expression. I loved that I had the contrast between these highly personal moments (with my friends) and the highly impersonal world of porn. Once I painted them at such a large-scale their faces took on a whole new life as these ethereal, sculptural elements."

Also in the show will be large resin pieces featuring swarms of "Little Boos", colorful canvases and small-scale sculptures that will include "Little Boo" dolls.<

Originally from Oxford, England, Bettag graduated with honors from the Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts in London. Susannah Bettag lives in San Francisco with her husband and two-year-old twins.