Excerpt from "Infiltration", Dr. Alexander Wied; catalog "Pleasure; Christy Astuy im Kunsthistorischen Museum", 2000

.In Christy Astuy's paintings we encounter a three-fold refraction. They offer a view of reality in that they are representational in the traditional sense, but we are dealing with second- and third-hand reality: they depict something artificial and they re-reflect painting. Her choice of material, the pictures she plays with, are different from what was used in Pop Art, and so is her socio-asthetic intention. Some of the motifs she uses are gleaned from the spheres of kitsch, consumer goods and every-day life (this would apply to Pop Art), but she transcends the Pop Art approach in the way she uses the material and in her renderings of, for example, postcards or greeting cards as well as from the world of advertising and the glamour of a morbid high society. Her third source of inspiration seems to be the really bad naive painting one finds in chain stores selling pictures and in ice-cream parlors. As she renders these in a monumentalizing way she ironically plays with postmodern painting.... Let's call this self-reflection of painting as a medium "meta-painting". Moreover, in her pictorial inventions, which are meticulously planned, to the extent that they can legitimately be called "compositions" in the traditional sense, Astuy challenges the trivial basis of her imaginings, thus charging the paintings with meaning. She "generates" a derived articficial reality, and in doing so, she does not have "real reality" in mind or before her eyes but a reality of the second and third order, multiply refracted, meta-painting, a world of images in which kitsch, imagination and psycho-analysis...combine in an indissoluble alliance.

Excerpt from “Recycled Beauty; Christy Astuy in an interview with Otmar Rychlick”, catalog “Pleasure; Christy Astuy im Kunsthistorischen Museum”, 2000

O.R.: What is it that you still find interesting about beauty in art-this is what one is prompted to ask, even though I think that isn't what you are interested in - or not primarily. I am alleging here, and that's not a nice thing to do. You have to be careful to prevent this from becoming a soliloquy between me and myself. It won't happen the other way round, I'll see to that! With this in mind, my question to you is: what about beauty in your art?

C.A.: I don't think Barbies are beautiful at all, but when I paint a Barbie she is a symbol for a beautiful girl. When I paint plastic flowers in a kitschy vase they are about being beautiful, and also about the fact that beauty isn't what it used to be. A Barbie is a fake beautiful girl. And now it doesn't matter if flowers are plastic or real. Or if I paint them directly from a postcard, which was actually imitating a painting anyway. A postcard imitates a painting imitates a postcard again. The same thing with the fashion models I paint as quasi heroines of Great Paintings Of The Past. Art stealing from art stealing from art. Recycled beauty. Layers of association.

O.R.: So yours is not a notion of beauty that is sentimental and lofty, retreating from the world laying claim to a kind of autonomy that makes it incontestable - of course, one would have to consider that as fraud to the detriment of reality today, a notion of beauty that does not want to be associated with anything at all and relentlessly revolves around itself, complacently, inaccessible to any kind of reflection, meaningless. Rather, art has to admit that itI is involved in relationships, that it is extremely relative and questionable. And indeed, the beauty of your paintings, or rather: beauty in your paintings is not at all dogmatic, it is a kind of beauty that is flawed in many ways, but there is this longing for perfection - which will never be fulfilled entirely. This tendency towards perfection, which traditionally presents itself as beauty, and the insight that it can never be achieved, the maliciousness not to let something happen that can't happen anyway - this is what in essence seems to me the nature of your painting, something highly subversive and also fragile. As you've said, beauty becomes a symbol, however, one that is very intense, almost obscene, standing for the incontestability of reality. How does this come about?

C.A. I've always had this sort of “lofty” nature. God knows where that came from - and so I've always experienced reality as a sort of rude awakening.

O.R.: But this can't be more that just the beginning. Can you give me a summary of your biography? Your paintings would have to emerge in it, wouldn't they?

C. A.: I'm from California, that place without roots or traditions. I grew up wild in almost total freedom. That freedom was confusing and it was dangerous.When I came to Vienna I felt lonely, but the isolation made sense: I was foreign. It felt good to have barriers. I found out in Vienna that there are things you do and things you don't do, and certain things are done certain ways. I found that beautiful. I love the boundaries of painting. Of a canvas with four sides and a technique that must be mastered according to certain rules. That's where my life and my work started to coincide, maybe. Or that's where my life stopped and my work started.

O.R.: You painted the eight works on show at the Kunsthistorisches Museum specifically for the exhibition. Even the old frames were made available to you for these paintings. All of this indicates an intention, a strategy. Obviously, you want to present and also achieve a certain kind of engagement. What was it that inspired you, and what are you driving at?

C.A.: One of the first paintings I can remember that really turned me on was one of those famous battle scenes from Paolo Uccello. There's this bucking horse, kicking his legs out behind him; his rump is big and round and his horseshoe-shod hooves are like two big U's. These simple, sensuous forms fascinated me. I couldn't stop looking at it. I think that's when I decided that I wanted to be a painter.
What still fascinates me today in the work of the Old Masters, and why I can still identify with them in a modern context, is this reliance on form _ and color, of course, which is primarily necessary for the definition of form - as a means of expression. I think it's very modern today not to be self-expressive in an obvious way, that is, not to invent. By concentrating on the rendering of form, one is already deep into the problems of painting, without having to become too subjective, and so less “universal”, or general. I think it's important that the viewer can recognize what he sees, not as a tree being a tree, but the sensation of recognition. that he knows about trees, that he can related it to his own experience. In depicting the mysteries of religious beliefs, the Old Masters were compelled to use the forms and images of reality. A lot of people feel intimidated by their language of clouds and draperies, and feel they're looking at something that has nothing to do with them, and that they don't have the knowledge to understand it, when, to me, it's all about looking at things, at the objects themselves that go into making the picture, from the human form to the gold brocaded drapery to the tree branch to the little dog to the basket of fruit to the angel's wing. In this way I see these renderings of objects from reality (after all, an angel's wing is just a bird wing stuck onto the back of a baby, or a long-haired boy in a dress) as abstract: they're just building a composition, like a spot of green here or a red slash there, in a so-called non-objective painting. Then there is the fascinating aspect of technical skill, which must be combined with taste, which has to do with knowledge. The decisions that go into a painting of any complexity are mind-boggling in their number, and the thread that holds them all together is the idea. But when the painter works with “realistic” form, there is no vagueness; every component of the work is clear and visible to be judged. I love that, that definitiveness. It's daring. - Which brings me back to me, and how I could be crazy enough to hang my pictures next to those of the Masters'. All of that which I've just tried to explain above is what I try to do in my own work. Of course the images are different today, but only slightly. Mostly it's a matter of fashion and design. Our clothes are different, our furniture, our hairstyles. That goes without saying. But, at least in this empirical world, we're still dealing with the same material. Not the same ideas, but the same forms. Ideas more or less come and go. Form is everything.

“Hoping for an Alternative”: Christy Astuy’s “Pastorale”, Brigitte Huck; catalog “Pastorale”, Galerie Menotti, 1997

“Pastorale” relates to idyll, it is something rural; occasionally it also involves shepherds. A “pastorale” is playful, poetic and serene. Its more boisterous variation is called burlesque, which may in turn be taken to extremes in the grotesque, and in painting this can finally become shrill parody, sugary kitsch or fantastic extravaganza.

ChristyAstuy’s new pictures contain a bit of each. And something more: they are entertaining, absurd, and nostalgic, they are beautiful and dangerous: they must teach men to know fear because hardly ever has the female gaze been directed on their private parts more provocatively. To begin with, Astuy’s most beautiful message is that you can reverse Friedrich Nietzsche’s often quoted phrase of man creating an image of women while women model themselves after that image. The representation of the male body in works by female artist, especially painters, is not frequently found and male nudes as a projection surface for female ideals are just as unusual. It is a joy to behold men for once taking the traditionally female role, becoming the object of the gaze while the female artist is in the position of the male and acting subject for once.

Astuy paints girls’ dreams ranging from Michelangelo’s or Donatello’s Renaissance Davids in paradisiacal bird-watching haunts to crooners in a South Sea setting. She picks the motifs surrounding Happy Boy, Bird Boy, and Hawaii Boy from splendid 18th century encyclopedias, postcards and travel brochures. The trivial paradise clichés convey the message of man as a fetish and, with tongue-in-cheek humor, they make clear where he belong: in the lady’s boudoir, a shapely, slightly perverse, bizarre bibelot which you can remove without much ado after blowing a good-night kiss.

For Astuy, the category of masculinity has nothing to do with bikers, cowboys and Marlboro-smoking machos but comes along with dreamy eyes and blond curls. The languishing boys are for devouring. You will look in vain for revolution and rebellion – the classic code of masculinity in the 20th century, which was reflected in erotically transfigured cult personalities from James Dean to Che Guevara – because subversion is reserved for the artist. With intelligent irony, which, after all, is the mother of all subversion, Astuy dares to combine art and banality. She is an entertainer who is having fun while letting us have a good time as she saucily focuses on the taboo theme of the male nude and demonstrates how you can completely dismantle the construct of masculinity by using accessories such as batik shirts, Venus shells and tutti-frutti wreaths. The pictures should turn us on before they lead us into the abysses of reality.

After all, Christy Astuy’s painterly expression is realistic, an approved technique generally understood at first sight. The details, depicted in demanding painterly technique, feign an empirical reality. However, it is actually a second-hand or a para-reality. The world outside is of very little interest to the artist as a subject-matter for her pictures; Astuy always looks for models which make up for the loss of harmony and estheticism that, to her mind, is characteristic of society today. No matter whether it is a solemn and precious copper engraving or the stereotypical wellness junk produced by the tourist industry, every quote in Astuy’s pictures is desecrated and toxically enriched at the same time. The toxic agent is called seduction, esthetics, pure beauty and travesty, and it is addictive. The paintings, composed in Old Masters’ style, scan the more agreeable side of life and seek out the last bastions of beauty in a dysfunctional world. They are about female experience, dreaming girls, mothers with dark, flashing eyes and fingernails painted red, babies, and couples of china dolls and nostalgic idylls of every description. L Dolce Vita is one of the telling titles, Après-midi d’une femme is another. With their combinations, absurd companions and the decorative gold stencil imprints that provide occasional sparkle, the pictures get carried away in a cheerful and surrealist manner. Nothing indicates that the artist is trying to avoid trashiness. On the contrary, trash is the driving force behind the positive energy dissipated by Assay’s pictures. Hers is a strategy of highly refined trivialization, and she aims at proving that the elite can easily be downgraded whereas the hackneyed is not hard to upgrade.

Artists from Salvador Dali to Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons had similar things in mind. They mobilized the potential of the popular, they were the taxi dancers whose perfect swing steps swayed between the esthetic spheres of high art and low art, and they were not afraid to be entertaining and funny instead of serious and solemn. They disregarded the established laws of modernism, hoping to provide and alternative to classic avant-garde. Art.

With her attitude liking the obstinately sophisticated with pleasurable trifling, Christy Astuy, the Californian art import from the white sands of the West Coast, has joined the game, and of all places, she chose to play it in the darkroom that is Vienna. “Enjoy it,” is what she advises her potential recipients to do. With pleasure!