Self-Portrait Looking at The Last Supper 1984

Marisol Escobar has made a Last Supper from carved wood, somewhere between sculpture and relief, with a few daubs of colour here and there. It feels so material, not like those smooth Renaissance paintings. There's a kind of refusal of painting here that’s interesting to me. The texture of the wood is everywhere, reminding you it’s a thing made of stuff. In some ways the colour feels kind of clumsy but look closer and you see it’s just enough to make the figures pop, to pull them forward from the wood. Those few dabs of colour really do a lot of work. They give you just enough information, but not too much, right? Like that blue sleeve, or the red tunic, just a suggestion of colour on the wood. You know, seeing this makes me think of Red Grooms. There's that same goofy love of making stuff, a kind of downtown, New York, screw-the-rules attitude to making art. Neither of them are afraid to get their hands dirty. They both show us that art doesn’t have to be so serious. It can be fun, even when it’s about something as serious as The Last Supper.