Artforum Critic’s Picks

Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton

GALLERY PAULE ANGLIM

14 Geary Street

In her oversize paintings of self-consciously tousled young artists, Caitlin Mitchell-Dayton manages to grant monumental dignity to a romantic lifestyle choice that is often mocked. These full-length portraits, rendered roughly ten feet tall and set against plain backgrounds, could be of alterna-youth billboard models—before the magic of Photoshop could clear their ruddy, zit-studded complexions. The painterly clarity of these canvases suggests Elizabeth Peyton’s washy portraits of fey musicians, smart celebrities, and friends—with the rose-colored lenses removed. Mitchell-Dayton’s fanlike admiration of the subjects is emphatically more knowing and personal, as most of the models here are recent students at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she teaches. (Fittingly, Mitchell-Dayton provided the canvases for Jerome, a lead character in Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 film of Dan Clowes’s Art School Confidential.) Their clothes are rendered with the kind of precision the subjects put into the composition of their thrift-store-meets-Diesel-chic wardrobes: rumpled jeans, fingerless gloves, layers of T-shirts; on the girls, army boots and Catholic-school skirts over denim. Across the board, hairstyles are luxuriously lanky. While this may seem like the artist is lampooning a specific demographic’s fashion identity, the appeal of these works is in Mitchell-Dayton’s earnestness. One may find a hint of satire in her attention to the vicissitudes of outsider style, but, as a portraitist, she manages a humanist empathy. Her pictures endearingly depict real individuals who seem to be growing into their lovingly rendered mottled skins and awkward sartorial choices—and perhaps even art careers.