Marcus Leslie Singleton: Winter Atlantic Summer

Uber, meet Under.

Even as identities swirl and intersect in the maybe-too-tech-connected world of today, when we know exactly what acquaintances ate for dinner last night and exactly when our car is coming to pick us up, the up-and-coming painter Marcus Leslie Singleton has chosen to take his work exploring his own cosmopolitan worldly Black identity not just to another level but another place and time.

This is best exemplified by one of the new paintings he did while at an artist’s residency earlier this year in Côte D’Ivoire. One of the revelations Singleton had during his month at the Fourchette de Rōze hotel arrived when a taxi showed up in a surprising form.

“These boys showed up on the beach on horses,” said Singleton, who originally grew up in Washington State and who was visiting Africa for the first time. “And if you want to go to town, you get on behind one of them and go. And what was so interesting was that it seemed slow, but it was much faster than trying to get a real cab or call an Uber. You might have to walk 20 minutes before you even found the place where a car could pick you up. And by the end of my time there, I had really started to appreciate horses for the first time.”

Not only were the two boys on their steeds the perfect subject for a painting, they were also the perfect metaphor for the physicality—the corporeal, tangible, rideable reality—that Singleton is perpetually trying to put his finger on. In Côte D’Ivoire, he found physicality galore.

Getting uprooted and unplugged from his then-life in Brooklyn, (Singleton moved to Catskill, New York, about six months ago), helped with that—though there are a few paintings from his New York life in the show too.

But for a disorienting jolt of foreign custom, striking physicality, low-tech wisdom, you could hardly do better than a horse-taxi on the beach on the Gulf of Guinea. The Côte D’Ivoire’s equatorial warmth (in January no less) also played a part in freeing him up to explore more intimate themes of the body, as seen in two canvases of swimmers. One is a modelish shot of a woman posing “dressed” in racing swim form, and the other, a casual snapshot of friends more skimpily attired, was painted at the pool of a hotel in a bohemia resort area down to the coast called Assinie-Mafia, a narrow isthmus between the Ébrié Lagoon and the ocean where he could choose from a freshwater, brackish or saltwater swim.

But the most complicated one is a self-portrait of Singleton in his studio there, stripped to the waist (though you might think he is stripped, period) with a nude portrait of a reclining man hung on the wall behind him, with three more fashionably clothed figures dropping by to visit. Based on the 1917 Bonnard painting, “La Cheminée,” of a nude woman, seen in a mirror above a mantel with a reclining female nude painting behind her. Singleton’s version substitutes his own sexual presence for the model’s (and a reclining man for the reclining woman in the background). It creates a fascinating dynamic of (African) Black visitors to an (American) Black artist’s studio in Africa, turning Bonnard’s century-old trope on its head in several intriguing ways, allowing for fresh new readings that aren’t so easy to nail down.

Some cryptic sexual energy also bubbles up in another painting set in the artist’s Catskill studio, where a naked woman is painted by a naked man, allowing for all kinds of ambiguity but with a palpable sense of physical liberty. Another portrait of Singleton’s former lover, “Mar,” posing with his cat Lint is maddeningly hard to read, suggesting sultriness, weariness, distrust, impatience and love. It can’t be all of them—can it? 

Other works in the show capture moments big and small, brief and long. Still lifes with flowers depict spots the artist happened upon and wanted to hold onto; the same impetuous desire to capture the moment characterizes a painting of an elegant New York couple Singleton saw on their way out for the evening. But murky, almost-Martian landscapes in monochromes of brownish red suggest the long shutter speed of geological time.

All of them reflect the artist’s eagerness and skill at depicting complex physical presence —whether flowers, hills or bodies clothed and nude. It’s not a surprise to hear Singleton say that he’s enjoying painting flowers lately, since his own arrangements are deceptively simple. Just like flowers themselves, the paintings look sweet and naïve, but there’s so much more buzzing below the surface that can’t be nailed down.

David Colman