SAN FRANCISCO, CA. – Frey Norris Gallery is pleased to present, “Vanitas Baby,” the debut solo exhibition for San Francisco artist Susannah Bettag, opening Thursday, February 1 and continuing through March 14, 2007. Vanitas refers to the early tradition of 17th century Dutch still-life paintings that used a discreet set of symbols to depict the transitory nature of human life. Vanitas paintings often included skulls, rotten fruit, dying flowers, watches, hourglasses, smoke, bubbles and musical instruments. These still life paintings also served as moralizing messages reminding the viewer of the hollowness of sensory pleasures. For “Vanitas Baby,” Bettag adapted her own symbols and vernacular (her invented character “Little Boo”, women-only pornography, domestic appliances, plants and spores, virus-like formations) and appropriated traditional symbols to reinvest meaning in this Old Master motif, essentially reinventing it for the 21st century.

As with my paintings, I liked all the different layers of meaning that could be pulled from the name ‘Vanitas’ (vanity and shallowness, temporality and mortality). Adding 'Baby' made it fresh and cheeky. The intricate detail in Bettag’s paintings echoes the chaos of her internal musings, and in their complexity and obsessiveness reference the high level of detail and craft of traditional women's art (the sampler, the quilt, the needlepoint). Bettag elaborates, “I am intrigued and awed by obsessive behavior in the creation of art. I am inspired by traditional women’s craft like needlepoint and quilting that is very small-scale, detailed and labor-intensive requiring a focus that borders on the neurotic.”

Bettag’s organic process involves multiple layers that evolve into a cornucopia of texture and detail. Starting with color studies and a basic sketch taken from pornography, she marks up a transparency to line-up various layers of the painting. Layers of meaning, like layers of identity, literally lay one over the other, and as Bettag's work matures, the depth and complexity of this layering grows staggering, without sacrificing humor or genuine sexual desire. The use of strong, complementary colors provides a bold and appealing foundation and prevents the layers from collapsing into an incomprehensible mess.

A love of color informs Bettag’s work and she is quick to note her influences. “I just went to the Howard Hodgkin’s retrospective at the Tate Britain in London. I have always been a fan, but seeing all his work in the flesh I was transfixed. His use of color is just amazing - rich, deep, glowing and brave.”

My paintings are intended to be exquisite objects, ones that initially at least give the viewer a visceral sense of pleasure, primarily through color. They are full of contrasts, built up of layers that both hide and highlight.

Bettag’s previous series, “Internal Workings,” “Dirty Little Secrets” and “Women’s Work,” featured pornographic silhouettes adorned with a tiny cartoon character Bettag has dubbed, “Little Boo” as well as common symbols of domesticity and violence. Bettag’s work shares motifs with modern Japanese artists,as well as traditional Japanese woodcuts and ink paintings and calligraphy. Techniques are sometimes borrowed from the classic Japanese style, “ukiyo-e,” literally “floating world,” including the use of a crisp pictorial line and flat color and the flat but fluid renderings of three-dimensional objects. These are blended with the modern juxtapositions of cute and violent, or sweet and crazy imagery reminiscent of Anime cartoons. “My character, Little Boo, most certainly has distant, or maybe not so distant, Japanese cousins,” comments Bettag.