IT CAN HAVE ASTONISHED NO ONE

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

The latest achievement of Wilson Altice, one would imagine, can have astonished no one who know him or his paintings well. The altercation at a restaurant, the ensuing fistfight with a nearby wedding party, the subsequent departure with the about-to-be bride, with whom he moved to Bora Bora and fathered two children, is just just what the outsized he-men of “Pennsylvania Drillbit” and “Blood: You Love To See It.” The men who populate Altice’s large canvases put themselves above everything, which necessarily means putting everything beneath them: all is grist for their boundless vanity. 

Strangers to modern art, particularly the kitschy if fiercely impressive battlescapes that are Altice’s stock in trade,  may know the man only from his advertising campaigns on behalf of soft drinks and neckties—indeed, of all the modern artists, and he has been the most willing to extend himself into the commercial sphere. And if that is where they have seen him, they no doubt equate him with his persona: bookish and bespectacled, with a wry grin offered more often in the back of the frame or its corners than front and center.

But how to reconcile that with Bora Bora, with the bride spirited away to there, with the two children, with the three additional offspring he shared with his Polynesian house manager, with the arsenal of weapons that would shame that of most small nations, with the guard dogs, and finally with the new work, which surpasses the old not only in its wry humor but in its terrifying violence? The centerpiece of the new set is indisputably Force the Forty-Niners, a massacre set among nineteenth-century gold-panners. The size is gargantuan, more than twenty feet square. The composition is cinematic. The colors are overwhelming, with incarnadine reds swimming across fields of gilt. One critic who visited Bora Bora was rumored to have fainted and lay at the base of the painting for more than an hour. It is not possible to discount this rumor entirely. It is perhaps best to recall the tag line from the first commercial that Altice ever filmed, more than twenty years ago, for a high-tech shaving system. “That’s the thing,” he said, beginning to grin. “You just never know.”