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2001-01-14

Yesterday a day of Chelsea gallery visits. At Marianne Boesky, recent works by Lisa Yuskavage, a large-scale oil painter with lots of magenta in her palette, whose fantastical female subjects look like teen-room pin-up waifs. Vacant-eyed and pouty-lipped, bare breasts tumbling out of flimsy baby doll peignoirs, young women and women all at once no longer young�showing the first permanent creases, the first droop of chin flesh�at leisure in luxurious homes or hotel suites, seated near windows admitting views of cloudless lavender-washed skies�a heaven.

I imagine these tousle-headed trophies draped in pearls to represent the souls of living women, of women visiting the gallery�their private body souls which live upon another plane, and wonder at the progress of the body through the years, and patiently wait to be called into being, within the flesh, their existence recognized, accepted. They are the expression of the countless hours that every woman spends worrying about how well her body looks�is it still young, and firm, and desire-inspiring enough?�they wait to be released into the world, but worry and procrastination and self-disgust keep them aging in the sky�not guardian angels, but aspects of the self, imprisoned on another plane�a super-ultraviolet realm in which they dwell occupationless, sunk in reverie.

At the Dia Center, optical thrill paintings by Bridget Riley, including one of the Orpheus series, another one of which forms the background to the image on my �Older� page. Dizzying, hilarious precision�acrylic is a wonderful thing in modern life, no other way to make those crisp perfectly uniform lines swoosh out into space�I think of the Winter Olympics when all the downhill ski racers wore those skull surface-elongating helmets.

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