ARTnews, January 1988
Ida Applebroog
Any seasoned horror-movie fan has learned to recognize scenes of domestic harmony or innocent flirtation as infallible cues for the onset of disaster. In Ida Applebroog’s paintings, a surface calm similarly masks the grim and sometimes darkly comic horrors of everyday life.
In her earlier work, Applebroog employed a film or comic-strip format, offering a series of identical, apparently innocuous scenes whose simple banality might suddenly turn sinister with the addition of a caption line.
More recently, Applebroog has departed from the linear time and narrative development suggested by this format for a more complex amalgamation of scales, styles, and types of images. The works in this show were eclectic in composition, at times combining earlier-style strips with large, awkwardly drawn figures, vestiges of landscape, and medium-size single-frame tableaux. The various images of the paintings are realized in unappealing shades of brown, gray, dun-red, or institutional green that undermine the perky cartoon look.
Among Applebroog’s favored themes are the underside of sexuality as it degenerate into voyeurism, incest, or sadism; the indignities of old age as flesh sags, senility beckons, and children grow impatient for one’s death; and the loss of childhood innocence. Many of the images seem culled from Reagan’s America—there are beauty queens, high-stepping chorus girls, older and younger couples, and family groups. But a chill permeates these ostensibly cheerful vignettes, so that even the most cozy—a plump grandmother knitting in her easy chair, a man supportively clasping another by the shoulder—have an ominous undertone. A middle-aged man and woman face each other in conversation; the caption below, “We’re not animals,” laces the banal scene with hints of dark secrets. A young boy on a bench sits quietly upright, with hands folded, above the words “I was about eight,” conjuring up an unspoken confession of molestation or delinquency.
Even the images without words carry a sinister charge: a fleshy, bikini-clad body in a starlet pose is topped with an aging female face; a young boy chews on a watermelon slice in a barren field. Everywhere an emptiness gnaws at these characters, so that ultimately their suppressed cruelties, forced gaiety, or stoic withdrawal all appear as strategies for starving off that overwhelming loneliness that is our fate as human beings. More effectively than other, more celebrated purveyors of absence, Applebroog seeks the contemporary heart of darkness and finds it locked within ourselves.
ELEANOR HEARTNEY
