The Scottish figure painter Stephen Conroy remains extremely intrigued with the male figure -- and with himself. For that reason others should be just as intrigued. More so, anyway, than they appear to have been aware of Conroy this side of the Atlantic since the artist, now 56, first started showing his work at the Marlborough Gallery. He's currently installed 39 new oil-on-canvas figure or face studies -- 23 of them, if I'm counting correctly, self-portraits, or, as he labels some, "S. P."
All of the nearly full-length (cut off mid-thigh or sometimes lower) pieces -- whether of him or of male friends identified by initials or, in two instances, as "The Man you never Knew" and "The Man you never Knew II" -- depict a single figure dressed in street clothes (a suit, a white shirt with open collar, a great coat) standing against an abstract background.
All of the men -- Conroy, particularly -- have adopted serious expressions. They're caught in reflective moments, some harboring more disturbed thoughts than others. In several, Conroy, bearded and in some degree of brooding, holds an object that's probably a cell phone (or mobile phone, as he would call it). Perhaps he's underlining the contemporary nature of the images. Perhaps it's merely because when he thinks of himself these days, he sees himself with cell phone at the ready.
Sometimes the backdrop is bare but for a horizontal line suggesting a floor meeting a wall. Other times blocks or strips of (red, yellow, black) color are placed symmetrically or asymmetrically at the outer edges of the canvas. Around the outlines of every figure (but not all the head studies), there's a wider, lighter and somehow ghostly border that could be meant to suggest movement. Possibly, Conroy has it in mind that the expanded borders represent "auras" -- those spiritual whatevers that many people claim they see surrounding everyone.
Because the enigmatic figures are hermetically sealed in amorphous environments, they conjure Francis Bacon and the ambiguous, muted hue locales in which he deposited his figures. Strengthening the urge to recall Bacon are three self-portraits facing visitors as they enter the gallery space. The portraits -- Conroy with eyes closed in the one at the left, then opening his eyes in the middle frame and then opening them more widely at the right -- are immediately reminiscent of a Bacon triptych in which action of some sort is implied.
But while Conroy may intend them to complement Bacon's oeuvre, they're also qualitatively different. Whereas Bacon's paintings use distortion as a metaphor for turbulent emotions, Conroy challenges the viewer with realism. Bacon was baring the tormented soul. Conroy is saying, "Here I am" or "Here he is," and thereby charging viewers to make what they will of the introverted gaze or the extroverted look meeting theirs. It's Conroy as Everyman, as Ecce Homo.
Most of the smaller portraits of heads are studies for the bigger paintings, but in them the dramatically articulated facial planes are even more up-close-and-personal, more startling. One -- a study of Conroy in profile, where his mouth and chin are obscured by an upturned coat color -- could be taken for a '30s rendering of a worried forgotten man. A self-portrait in which a shadow obscures half Conroy's face and in which he bends his head into his collar but allows his cleft chin to remain visible has the unnerving Cubistic glare of a Max Beckmann character.
One thought that has to be stopping gallery visitors in their tracks is the realization that every one of the 39 paintings has been done, or at least completed. in 2010. That suggests Conroy, who works alone, has to have been toiling at a frenzied pace. The image of him going about his routine inevitably clashes with the contemplative images on canvas of him and his associates. They speak of his long-time interest in depicting obviously intelligent, thinking, never blissfully at peace men -- often men of accomplishment, at least one scientist among the earlier works. In them resides a charged paradox that makes what Conroy turns out that much more riveting.