XX It was the timing, the deft nearly comic timing that first drew me to the work of Eric Fischl. It was the thing about to happen, the act implied but not illustrated, the menacing relations between family members that made Eric Fischl’s paintings disturbing. It was the way in which he forced the viewer to fill in the blanks, to answer the question: What exactly is going on here? In his early work invariably the answer was sex; first sex, illicit sex, weird sex, seeing or touching something you shouldn’t, rubbing up against the taboos of familial flesh, interracial relations, etc.; the kind of thing you’ve considered, but aren’t necessarily willing to admit. Yet, in order to read the paintings, one had to participate, to admit at least to oneself that yes, we have noticed. It was that, exactly that, the way Fischl subtly and subversively required the viewers to call upon their own experiences, fantasies, nightmares, that impressed me most.

XX Now, having moved away from the psychosexual drama of the suburban experience to focus on the figure, Fischl remains a compulsively honest painter, depicting the very parts of ourselves we work so hard to keep hidden. In his nudes the body becomes a landscape, the expression of the life lived, physically and emotionally. He turns paint into folds of flesh, curving, contorted, ever-evolving shapes that contain the person we’ve become. His unblinking, melancholy celebration of the body and all its apparent faults are incredibly significant given the current climate of erasure–surgical cancellation and correction of the very marks that other cultures celebrate: age, weight, and the like. In an America that has developed an addiction for blotting out physical characteristics–our most basic identity–by embracing what is plastic and preserved, Eric Fischl has produced perhaps the most terrifying body of work to date: a series of nudes where we see that even the nude, the stripped figure, wears a kind of psychological clothing that goes beyond the skin. What’s hidden is in the thoughts; and this time the figure, the gesture comes closest to the disconnection of madness.

a. m. homes In writing, in order to pull a story out you go so far into your mind that when you come out you feel you’ve traveled through time and that either you’ve been somewhere incredibly different or that the world has changed. And that’s a good day’s work, but it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience. In painting, where do you go?
ERIC FISCHL You go into the painting. I mean it’s the same thing, I would imagine.

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