When I saw that Pavel Zoubok is opening a new show of Christopher Tanner's work tonight - the fourth solo at this gallery - I began looking for a press release. I wasn't surprised at not finding one. A press release would be kind of "as if to say" something almost irrelevant about this fascinating artist. Instead I found a review of one of Tanner's earlier shows by Robert Kushner, a painter who has evolved through the Pattern and Decoration movement - and who also created the mural in my local subway station, the number 6 at 77th Street.

In 1995 Kushner characterized an encounter with a theoretical art fan and Christopher Tanner as follows:

Stymied admirer: "I hate your new paintings. They look like some 13th Street Carmen Miranda drag queen."
Christopher Tanner: "Thank you for noticing."

Left: The Queen of Hell, 2009. Right: Master of the Universe, 2009. Copyright Christopher Tanner, courtesy Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

Kushner goes on to say, The paintings in his recent exhibition are filled with broad whiplash strokes of acrylic paint, layered with subsequent Salome's veils of opalescent glitter. As if this isn't enough, Tanner attaches clots of brilliant paillettes that might be bunches of technicolor grapes or close-ups of nerve ganglia. Add trompe-l'oeil vines in acrylic--and more glitter. The vines, presiding like confident opera divas, can be read as surrogate self-portraits: the artist as survivor, clinging, still growing, languishing in the dark and ultimately luxuriating in the light.

It is impossible to create paintings that incorporate glitter and paillettes without reference to the tawdry. However, Tanner's new work transcends cheapness and beams us up into a dizzying contemplation of optimism amid loss and despair. At odds with much of today's work referring to the AIDS epidemic, an issue close to Tanner, these paintings refuse to reside in mourning and outrage. Instead they put forth a heady, occasionally mindless, optimism.

And it's been uphill ever since. The 2007 show I saw of Tanner's work, also at Pavel Zoubok, included paillettes that had been donated to the artist by a survivor of one of the AIDS epidemic's casualties, a drag queen admired by a fellow drag queen. That's right, Tanner is regarded as highly for his performances as he is for his paintings. His concerns as a speaker on the subject through his art and performances, and also as a speaker at the podium, has made him a bellwether for many other artists from the world he inhabits.

In deepening his commitment to the cause, Tanner has deepened the emotional content of his art. Many of the swirling loops of paint that connect disparate elements in his paintings (whose closely related values keep them from flying off the wall) can be read as the scientific evidence of submicroscopic inquiry. The way in which he combines found stuff - such as faux jewels, and small medallions inscribed with words that refer to people in the life - with deliberate scrawls across the heavily built up surfaces, joins together elements of lives fractured by tragedy with a too-much-can-never-be-enough panache that celebrates those lives as lived. The new work that goes on view tonight takes the fineness of Tanner's artistry and craft to the level of true jewels.

The wording in the title of this page comes from a statement by the drag queen Tede Matthews, who finished it off by saying, "So anything we put on is drag."

Christopher Tanner: The Queen of Hell and The Horn of Plenty opens tonight from 6:00-8:00 pm at Pavel Zoubok Gallery. 533 West 23rd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, New York, NY. 212.675.7490.

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