Jim Torok paints and draws tiny portraits like a Northern Renaissance master. He is also a gifted cartoonist. On large sheets of paper he draws hilarious storyboard narratives about his life as an artist. It’s hard to say which are better, the apples or the oranges.
The self-portraits here are observed and painted with magical intensity on blocky little panels. Wearing a different color T-shirt in each, the balding, goateed artist gazes impassively back at the viewer. It could be there is a certain irony in his expression, as though he were thinking how absurd it is to pay so much attention to such an unprepossessing mug. In any case the images are extraordinarily lifelike.
The comic narratives feature a bean-headed surrogate for the artist who struggles with the mundane frictions of his life as an artist. They are funny visually as they are verbally. “I Have to Get to Work” is about procrastinating to the point of despair. “Who the Hell Do I Think I Am?” is about a multiple-identity crisis.
You might reasonably encourage Mr. Torok to keep up his high-low act. But what if he were to combine the two? The possibilities could be interesting.
Ken Johnson, The New York Times, November 8, 2002
In a 1970 interview, Chuck Close affirmed a statement made by art historian Ernst Gombrich: "The problem of illusionist art is not that of forgetting what we know about the world. It is rather inventing compositions that work." Close's tightly controlled early portraits of art-world folk make for an obvious, though ultimately unsatisfying, comparison to Jim Torok's portraits of art-world folk in his "hi tech lo tech" exhibition. But if we understand "compositions" to include problems of scale, cropping, and markmaking in the context of the realist image, Gombrich's statement is key to Torok's sensibility.
A consummate draftsman with a split personality, Torok makes tiny, exquisitely detailed likenesses in oil and graphite; he also draws touchingly crude cartoons. Like Close, he works from photographs, combining extreme scale with painstaking surface. Both of these artists use the human visage as a means to engage the photographic double whammy of mimetic accuracy and abstract flatness. But unlike Close, Torok does not make monumental claims for his hands-on approach. Pocket-size and paired with his goofy "lo tech animations," his portraits are insouciant, gregarious; they function best in a crowd. Rather than rely on photography per se, they compose themselves along the sequential, frame-after-frame lines of the movies.
The "hi tech" part of the show took up two rooms: In one, twelve exactingly realized oil paintings were presented; in the other, five pencil drawings and three earlier oils. Cropped at conventional bust length, mostly frontal and deadpan, Torok's subjects are locked in the isolating frame of the mug shot. There is a passport-photo pathos to this, but, as installed, the faces didn't look lonesome. The two groups of works were hung in eye-level quasi friezes, like filmstrip frames unspooling horizontally. Specific in features, uniform in presentation, the faces seemed in colloquy, animating each other while remaining individual. The comparative physicality of the paintings which are done on inch-thick archival polymer board and thus project a bit from the wall brought a further dynamism to their presence, emphasizing the variation between the two bodies of work: color versus black and white, paint versus pencil, block versus paper.
Like Jan van Eyck's angels and burghers or Vija Celmins's household appliances, Torok's "hi tech" faces are built up with such attention to surface that a cool privacy tempers their intimate address. This effect was balanced, though, by the "lo tech" side of the exhibition. Here the play between still and moving image was primary, and intimacy occurred in a whole other register.
Torok is one of a growing number of artists emerging from the inimitable Pierogi 2000 gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where his "lo tech animation" slide-show performances are already something of a legend. In the back gallery, a continuous fifteen-minute slide-show loop played such classics as Running Man (big-nosed figure locomotes forward step by clunky step) and The Airplane Trip (the plane crashes, slowly). Playing id to the portraits' ego, the cartoons are a core aspect of Torok's artistic personality. Their inspired silliness turns the whole idea of illusion into a joke, but the joke is funny precisely because the illusion holds. In Gombrich's terms, Torok has hit on workable compositions, not only within but across his media.
Frances Richard, Artforum, February 2000
There was already a buzz about this show by the time it opened at the 529 West 20th Street building several weeks ago. But all I could glimpse that night through a sea of heads were the edges of some small, exquisite portraits and some abstracts—just enough to suggest that something really unusual was going on. After having revisited the show, I'm happy to report that it's even better when you can actually see it.
Most of the exhibition is devoted to Jim Torok's tiny portraits. Torok (who draws the Another View cartoon for Paper) started painting his friends about a year ago; these likenesses capture them looking wary and alert, sort of like mug shots. If some of the faces look familiar, that's probably because they are. There's Kiki Smith with one pierced eyebrow slightly raised, and Bill Maynes, the dealer himself, with his face half in shadow. Realist master Philip Pearlstein is pictured with his forehead furrowed (maybe he's pondering his current auction prices).
You might expect Torok's work to be loaded with the same sub-textual clues about celebrity that dress up the work of hot realists like John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton. But what's truly refreshing about Torok's portraits is that they are just that — faces rendered precisely in layers so that both the images and the paintings' surfaces seem to glow. Weirdly, they also have that mysterious hallmark that many of us learned as kids to associate with "great" painting: Each subject's eyes seem to follow you around the room.
This sense of mystery is beautifully echoed in Matt Magee's small abstractions. Working in oil on wood, Magee uses a vocabulary of discs, crescents and lines; in many of these exquisite compositions, circles seem to float within circles over a cloudy Ab Ex–style background. The colors are all slightly retro—putty, ochre and vermilion are favorites. They seem caught up in an aesthetic twilight zone somewhere in the middle of early American Modernism, '50s kitsch and '90s computer imagery. But like Torok's portraits, their modest, old-fashioned air ultimately makes them appealing — and also cutting-edge.
Carol Kino, Time Out New York, October 1997