Objects of Our Desire

Elizabeth Peyton.

Elizabeth Peyton paints David Bowie.

"Sleeping, reclining, sitting, daydreaming, fantasizing, brooding -- Ms. Peyton hardly ever depicts these young artists and musicians standing, and she never visually associates them with an activity like making art or music -- Ms. Peyton's friends and lovers Piotr and Tony and Liam encounter her celebrity obsessions John Lennon and Prince Harry and Kurt Cobain like chess pieces on opposite sides of existence. The tribe of the obscure look strikingly similar to one another: blank-faced, thin, closed-up yet strangely open, looking so intensely outward that it feels they must actually be looking inward.

They are also strikingly similar to the tribe of the celebrities, who bear the same physical features. You feel that the desire of Ms. Peyton's friends to be famous is so powerful that they have acquired the appearance of the celebrities they yearn for -- the way dogs begin to resemble their masters."

Stella Vine.

Stella Vine paints Kate Moss.

"Most jarring of all, nearly all of Ms. Peyton's subjects, both famous and obscure, don't just resemble each other. They also look a lot like her: delicately featured, wispish, androgynous. Ms. Peyton has spoken of how moved she has been by Proust's meditations on the nature of time, and how Proust's work has influenced her attempts to capture her subjects in the web of fleeting mortality. But it seems that what she has really taken from Proust is his exploration of the way we project ourselves onto the objects of our desire. We recreate the people we love -- and the people we hate -- in our own image."

Alice Neel.

Alice Neel paints Andy Warhol.

"Ms. Peyton's likenesses may not capture her subjects as intimately as we would like, but she has used the embattled genre of portraiture to lay bare a very contemporary perceptual and emotional predicament. At a moment when technology has made it possible to "know" people without ever meeting them in the flesh, there is the peril of imagining them as mere reflections of our own wishes and obsessions. Then, too, we have just lived through a time when we were tempted into projecting our desires -- some would say our greed -- onto reality beyond the point where they could ever be satisfied. Ms. Peyton's dreamy, insubstantial figures, waiting to be fulfilled by fantasies that will never be realized, may be more intimately connected to us than we think."

- Lee Siegel, "Painting Faces", The Wall Street Journal, 2009.