Chris’s work will be featured in the upcoming book Stare, by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, to be published by Oxford University Press in early 2009.

The Drawing Papers
The Drawing Center, NY 2002

Excerpt of artist interview:
As a child I searched junk shops and thrift stores for evidence of life outside my little world. Over and over I would come across old medical books full of scary and beautiful images, the body grown wild and unfamiliar. These documents haunted me.

Years later I based a painting on a blurry photo from a 1920’s medical text, showing a boy with brittle bone disease. In painting this strange child I realized how much better it would be to work from life than from old books.

In 1998 I began to work in a facility for people with mental and physical disabilities, with the agreement that I would sketch during the quiet hours. This experience has been utterly remarkable for me. I find myself surrounded by what seems to be the original faces, like those seen in Bruegal—unguarded and completely without guile.

After observing for several months I began to make portraits. In rendering these individuals, my view is without judgment. The work seeks to portray the subjects and their existence as natural, rather than pathological. If anything, there is a strange grace around many of these people, and I have found no better way to represent this than as a condition of light.

Contemporary Magazine, London, 2002
By Katherine Zoepf

“In making us consider the faces and personalities of people we would ordinarily never see in portraits, Rush may have a social agenda, though he does not preach. The portraits are stark, the subjects have strange skin and staring eyes – one thinks of Jenny Saville, of Lucien Freud – yet they are suffused with a strange sense of grace.

In ‘Gloria’, a young women with a towel wrapped loosely around her head gazes upward, her eyes half closed. A shaft of light falls across her face, illuminating the hooded eyes, the folds of the towel. Suddenly, the towel-turban seems a reference to Vermeer, and you are thrown back several centuries. The subjects become not pathologies, but individuals – beautiful and utterly themselves.

Tucson Weekly, December 13, 2006
Margaret Reagan

Rush draws – and paints – with astonishing skill. But his pictures go beyond mere realism. Works like “Benjamin,” a Conté crayon on paper, are intensely emotional. This one is a profile of the head and body of a man, partially covered by a pink cloth falling from his shoulders. He is bald and fat, yet the artist gives him a glowing beauty.

Forgetting Paradise
Grafica Gallery, Tucson 2006

The recent work by Chris Rush calls to mind an eighteenth-century gentleman’s collection of wonders. It’s wildly eclectic, yet has an underlying logic. Objects and images in the collection murmur and speak to each other, generating a sense of meaning that is perceived more than stated. This sense of meaning, in turn, comes to shape the experience of each piece.

Take the drawings in brown ink on found paper: a strange bird, a beast-man, and an ape wearing a human skull as a crown. The style, the materials, and the subjects recall the natural history of monsters. How, our gentleman’s contemporaries asked themselves, are we to explain the bizarre mixtures and monsters produced in nature? This was an urgent concern as the peoples of Western civilization pushed into the untamed natures of multiple continents, where their encounters with the shockingly new and bizarre struck them with both fear and fascination. In retrospect, we know that at that time, nature and its monsters were part of a moral imagination concerned with the myth of Eden: the original paradise and the tragedy of sin. Historical texts of exploration are filled with wonder at the Edens found in the Americas and Africa, but they also resound with moral outrage at the monsters, real or imagined, that blemished paradise: unwanted evidence of the Fall. Wonder was always mixed with horror.

It’s hard to imagine that time from the perspective of our own, when nature has been stripped of its secrets, when evolution and genetics have rationalized the monstrous as merely anomalous — not miraculous or diabolical. In these drawings, however, Rush captures the history of nature’s monsters, before the demystifications of science, but he does so in a startlingly original way.

What Rush’s drawings demonstrate — and what animates his work in this show — is a manner of seeing that departs from the story of Eden, sin and decline. His subjects exist in an alternate perspective, one that doesn’t track through the long history of reading Genesis as the story of an outrage upon paradise. In fact, Rush’s vision doesn’t track through the Genesis story at all; his vision attempts to forget that story in order to open up the possibility of seeing the world in a new way.

Rush’s vision becomes more obvious as we put the works in conversation. For instance, the white still life of the paper airplane communicates with the portrait of the albino child. In the still life, the resemblance to a bomber plane is striking; yet here the weapon is re-imagined as an object of simple pleasure, a white toy floating on primary red. In the portrait, we are presented with an unusual boy, allergic to light itself, but who is portrayed glowing against the dark, an image of complex beauty. Stunningly, we recognize every color in the white of the child’s hair and skin, from lavender to pale amber and blue. In neither case does Rush engage in a simple reversal: the assertion of anti-technology against the dangers of technology, or the valorization of the boy’s individuality over the pity and fear of society. Rather, Rush uses the clarity of his visual language to force these figures into new trajectories of meaning — a history of technology dominated by the pursuit of pleasure rather than war; a history of human genetic mutation seen as exquisite rather than tragic or heroic.

Individually and as a collection the works in this show press the question of how our understanding of history, especially our underlying “mythological” assumptions, affect how we see. Thus, the archaism. The repeated reference to “the past” in Rush’s work — formally, materially, and thematically — must be understood within this effort to dislodge our vision from preconceptions of history’s meaning. This is neither naïve nor shallow; Rush’s work partakes in none of the so-called “irony” of postmodernism. His work is too alive, too consequential, and too filled with humor. It actually cares enough to engage you in more than the flattery of knowingness on which irony is predicated. Indeed, it asks you to join it in risking all of our conventional ways of seeing. For, as Rush shows us, when Paradise is not only lost but forgotten, the world offers itself as an altogether new source of pleasure.

Adam Geary, Ph.D

Except from Interview
The Artist’s Magazine
Cover Story – November 2006

I’m very concerned with the unknowability of another person. We want to know: Who is inside that body/? Who are these people? It’s the basic universal question… I give myself permission to stare, really stare at other people. That’s my job as an artist…Ultimately, though, my subjects are a mystery to me and I am drawn back to them again and again.