Vassilis H., The Kiss, 2022, oil on canvas (Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, NYC)

I once saw Mary Boone make out with her dog.

I should preface that I’m not a puppy hater, doggie-spit phobic, or even an anti-face- or lip-licker. Bring on the slobber! However, there was something alarming about voyeuristically staring at the typically stoic stalwart gallerist, the woman who fostered the careers of mega-art stars, was immortalized by Parker Posey in the 1996 film Basquiat, and would a few years later be pinched for hilariously scammy tax fraud, smooch her pooch in front of a small crowd in the back of a van that was shuttling us all to the valet parking on the Brant Foundation Art Study Center property in Greenwich, Connecticut.

How did I find myself part of this audience? Good question. It was one that I asked myself repeatedly that day, beginning with riding past Jeff Koons’s monumental floral Puppy, which cost six figures just to maintain. What seemed like an amusing idea at the time–accepting an invite to the opening of the Brant Foundation’s spring exhibitions (which I should note I do not receive these invites anymore)–turned out to be an enormous mistake. Beyond the grating combination of wealthy Succession types and art world wannabes trying to network, the organizers took the exhibition’s theme–Animal Farm–literally, turning a corner of the lush green lawn into an abattoir with carcasses, flayed and spreadeagle, roasting on spikes. Jesus Christ! I’ll pass on the meat at lunch–thanks. In short, it was a grotesque lurid affair. And yes, I have proof:

What horror film is this? (photo by moi at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center)

Yet, despite feeling as if the second course might include hunting us poors, the memory from that afternoon I’ve never been able to shake is of Mary and her pup, an admittedly adorable dachshund. Even almost five years later, that vision pops back into the front of my consciousness every so often. The most recent occurred while standing in front of Vassilis H.’s painting The Kiss in his exhibition Must Love Dogs at The Hole’s Bowery space.

There’s no question why. The painting depicts a noodle-like blonde-haired woman with her arm around her man. He, in turn, is not paying her any attention as he touches tongues and swaps spit with an enthusiastic yippy white fluff of a dog, the puppy’s tongue elongated and extended. The blonde looks on with her mouth agape in shock—or perhaps disgust. A mirror image, I assume, of my own in the back of that shuttle thankfully departing the Brant Foundation.

Vassilis H.’s The Kiss isn’t exactly as romantic as its gold-flecked counterpart: Klimt’s renowned masterpiece—and chosen dreamy college dorm room décor—of that same title. In the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition Jimmy DeSana: Submission, a wall label curiously imparts that DeSana claimed his extreme BSDM images are “without eroticism.” I think that can be debated. But DeSana’s assertion does, instead, perfectly describe Vassilis H.’s paintings. Despite the exhibition’s title seemingly ripped straight from the personal ads, or a long-forgotten 2005 romantic comedy starring Diane Lane and John Cusack, the Greek artist’s paintings are devoid of any passion whatsoever. Even with the sheer amount of licking in the works, from doggie kisses to heavy make-out sessions to a whole lot of vanilla ice cream cones. This detached quality is by design, of course. Vassilis H.’s figures inhabit a nebulous world in which all human interaction—and a bit of human/canine interaction—has turned absurd. You know, like the one we live in.

Vassilis H., Perfect Couple, 2022, Oil on canvas (Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, NYC)

Take, for instance, Perfect Couple. Set against a glowing blue background, as if a backdrop of a school picture day photoshoot, a blonde woman, with similar stringy-styled hair as in The Kiss, stands behind a man sporting a 1970s open-collared shirt, revealing a tuft of chest hair. The twosome stare out, cock-eyed at the viewer—the man glowering and the woman almost maniacally cheerful—rather than interact with each other. The only point of contact between the two is the woman’s arm, slung playfully over her partner. Despite being “perfect,” there is absolutely no chemistry whatsoever between them. This perfect couple most certainly sleeps in separate beds as if in the Hays Code-era films (which, apparently, according to social media, a certain grouping of cinema-scorning Gen Z neuters want us to go back to!). This sense of properly distanced twin beds is only heightened by the couple’s resemblance to Rock Hudson and Doris Day.

Of course, I cannot claim definitively that the Pillow Talk duo inspired The Perfect Couple. The Hole’s corresponding press release explains that “magazines, fanzines, films, and photographs from the 1970s and 1980s” influenced Vassilis H.’s paintings. Perhaps it’s this baked-in referential quality that makes his imagery and figures seem just so eerily familiar. Something just barely out of reach in your memory that you can never quite put your finger on it. For example, Five Women and a Man features a gaggle of women circling a suave man in a suit, holding up an ice cream cone. Trapped in their melodramatically fawning gaze, the man, with his handsomely haggard face, resembles a ragged lady’s man crooner like Leonard Cohen or Serge Gainsbourg. And yet, he cannot be either one since neither Cohen nor Gainsbourg would be caught dead holding a drippy sugary melting cone.

Vassilis H., Five Women With A Man, 2022, Oil on canvas (Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, NYC)

It would be near impossible, though, to ever pinpoint the source material, particularly with Vassilis H.’s cartoonish style. Just how cartoonish? Take a gander at the hot dog-shaped always-less-than-five fingers on the figures’ rounded hands. He’s not alone, though. Cartoonish seems to be the name of the game this winter, from obese women rolling on the floor devouring Crisco in Cumwizard69420’s The Americans at Cheim & Read to Katherine Bernhardt’s bare-assed Bart Simpsons in Canada. However, Vassilis H.’s style stands apart from these two examples not only because his subjects are less likely to be scrawled on a wall near the high school bad kids’ smoking section. There is a unique swirling sense of movement in his paintings that makes them quite captivating. This is perhaps most obviously seen in his paintings of dancers, including the clumsy Dancers with Ice Cream who clutch their cones even when the male dancer stomps on his partner’s toes.

Yet, the aspect of Vassilis H.’s paintings that had me snickering throughout The Hole was his rendering of faces. Vassilis H. transforms his subjects’ countenances into clownish distortions as if they were toying around with a face warp app or standing in front of a funhouse mirror (and given the sheer amount of ice cream in the show, this just might be a carnival). Some, such as the unfortunate woman in Portrait of a Woman with a Dog, have been spun too hard that they’ve gone cross-eyed. Others like the lady at the top left of Les Demoiselles D’Athenes have a frenzied edge framed by arched eyebrows, looking more like one of Willem De Kooning’s women than the Picasso painting that its title references. And lest you think it’s just the gals, gaze upon the man’s face in Cheating who is so surprised about being caught in the act that he appears to be having a stroke with his drooping mouth. Does he smell toast? All in all, the figures look like they’ve been bonked in the head one too many times, recalling Paul Cadmus’s figures at their most exaggerated.

Vassilis H., Portrait Of A Woman With A Dog, 2022, Oil on canvas (Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, NYC)

Whereas Cadmus was portraying the debauched booze-fueled excesses of sailors and their lady friends, Vassilis H.’s scenarios are never quite as clear, placed in front of great generic swaths of color or, at their most detailed, a sketch of clouds and a tan foreground as a nod to a beach scene as in Woman with a Dog on the Beach. With this lack of specificity, we’re only left with the actions in the works to interpret, which, other than dancing and French kissing, are very little. For the most part, what Vassilis H.’s figures are doing is posing. Not that posing is all that unusual of a fixation in 2023. Walk down the street and you’ll find someone with their phone held out at arm’s length.

Yet, who the hell are the people in Vassilis H.’s paintings posing for anyway? It’s certainly not each other, since even the most adoring like Seven Woman and a Cowboy seem distracted. Not their dogs either, who exist mostly as accessories or props for these posers. Possibly, they pose for us. Most fix their stare toward the viewer. Hell. Even the tongue-tied couple in Licking side-eye their onlooker rather than each other. And in doing so, they look ridiculous—charmingly so.

Vassilis H., Licking, 2022, Oil on canvas (Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, NYC)

This isn’t without its own inherent critique. It’s as if nobody can actually be in the present moment or with their present company. A kind of alienation while with others, which is interestingly juxtaposed with the sense of aloneness but not loneliness in many of the paintings in The Hole’s concurrent group exhibition of night-related works, The Midnight Hour, at their Tribeca space. While some of the paintings like Jason Birmingham’s The Path of Totality present people sitting solo in a disco ball-illuminated crowd, most of the paintings in the show, curated by Scroll, feature Hopper-esque solitary figures, walking their dogs or laying in a rumpled bed. These are mediative works, akin to those quiet hours before dawn. The opposite, in fact, of Vassilis H.’s subjects’ manic performances for others. Certainly, that nagging need to pose doesn’t feel unfamiliar either.

But, hey, cribbing a line from a onesie on sale at a Kenneth Cole pop-up benefitting mental health a block away from The Hole (that is hilariously the exact replica of a KoRN T-shirt I had as a 14-year-old), we’ve all got issues, right?

Adorable! (photo by me)