Wilshire Center

Women as Blanks: Milano Kazanjian’s paintings of women subvert portraiture. His subjects are not specific women, they are generic blanks. They function the way advertising, and even traditional art, has conditioned us to accept female images as models. One after another we are given vague women and ambiguous, self-conscious moments. The painting is coolly detached. Faces and bodies seem almost studiously emptied of thought. Only clothing or drapery gets a dose of textural reality, highlighting the model’s flatness and artifice. Occasionally an enlarged piece of stray lettering drops into the painting, making it look like a sheet from a advertising campaign awaiting the logo. The tricky thing is, this kind of imagery is so typical of representation we take for reality that the art almost gets by without being pegged as a critique.