Review

"Afterglow", Acrylic and Watercolor on Paper.

Jennifer Janesko
Pinup: Downtown

10 a.m.-6 p.m.

Rm 222 Gallery
222 W. 20th St.
Kansas City, MO
800.595.7757

Hours: 5-9 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday
Runs through: May 26

Artist's site: http://www.janesko.com
Gallery site: http://www.performancefurniture.com

The women on the walls at Rm 222 have suspiciously full lips, implausibly perfect hair and impossibly perfect bodies. They can't be real ... can they?

In a lot of cases, they're not.

Until recently, all of my pieces came from my imagination, artist Jennifer Janesko writes on her Web site. I combine elements from everything I see and experience to come up with a unique piece.  As such, few of my pieces actually represent a real person at all.

And while Janesko has started to use live models in her work, they're hardly the girls next door -- unless your house sits next to that of, say, burlesque queen Dita Von Teese. This is the stylized, flawless, airbrushed (in this case, literally) ideal of female beauty.

Call it pin-up, call it cheesecake ... by any name, it's been a part of the American artistic and cultural landscape since the Gibson girl.  Countless GIs kept pictures of Betty Grable in their lockers during World War II, which also saw the heyday of bomber art. And in the 1970s, thousands of teenaged boys found ... inspiration ... in the famous (or infamous) Farrah Fawcett poster.

Is it sexist? Exploitative? It's easy to say "yes," but the real answer might be a little more complex -- and not only because Janesko is a woman painting the female form. (People tend to get a greater degree of latitude in depicting their own.)

After all, Michelangelo's David is an impossibly perfect male form -- Really, who can live up to those obliques and lats? -- and nobody seems to get too bent out of shape about that. Wherever there is beauty, be it animal, vegetable or mineral, there's a natural tendency to idealize it.

And the female form, as Janesko depicts it, is not only shown beautifully -- it's done beautifully, whether in acrylic, watercolor, airbrush or any combination thereof. The carefully arranged curves of her creations seem almost three-dimensional, from the smallest tousle of hair or purse of lips to the arc of spine and sweep of hips.

Real or not, clothed or otherwise -- this is most emphatically not an all-ages show -- these women smolder.

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