The current show at the Student Artspace is entitled Passive/Aggressive. The paintings, by Nathan Buttleman and Daniel Sherill, are about, on different levels, neuoses. Though Buttleman's subject is political and Sherill's is primarily formal, the two painters' works are brought together in the examination of conditions of breakdown and dissolution. For Buttleman, the breakdown is that of the 1980s and the capitalist extravagance that is now the decade's mythical stature. Specifically, Buttleman's six paintings center on the American business executive, an iconography of white-collar priests. These are the men who wage hostile takeovers on the fields of the New York Stock Exchange. Men who have sublimated physical aggression to a somewhat less fierce buying and selling. However, Buttleman is not explicitly interested in the economic stratification of power, but rather the effects such power has on those who wield it. All the businessmen in the paintings are white men who have become the color of blue-gray death; they are baggy-eyed and healthless - empty automatons winding down. Indeed, these CEOs and shareholders wear uniforms: navy suits with red ties and an occasional stripe or pattern. In two instances, Decade Ghost and Ghost of a Neo-conservative, the subjects are reduced completely to these uniforms, as the heads and hands which once protruded from collar and cuffs, disappear in a greenish haze. Two paintings are mock-portraits. Rather than flattering portraits to adorn boardrooms, CEO and Executive Vice President are portraits of those whose lives have been spent kicking and groping to the top. Their color has been wasted away, their skin aged and mottled by the wear of the market. In the Senior Partners, four anonymous red-tied executives stare out with the same vacancy of those figures in Munch's painting that pour out of Karl Johann's gate. Buttleman's strongest work here is the Traders, for its greater pictorial space and active composition. Whereas the other paintings are, visually, more or less immediate, this painting draaws one longer to resolve figural movement, facial expresions, and an awkward perspective. One is sure the physical depravity of Buttleman's businessmen is metaphorical for a moral depravity and that these paintings are a collective indictment of the business sub-culture. to this extent - the painter's critique of getting and spending - Buttleman has perhaps fallen back on the simplistic cultural typing of the reflecting, penetrating artist and the superficial, materialistic businessman. This division has, of coarse, never been a clear one historically, but it is in the 1980s that art and business so perfectly disolved into one another. So somewhere behind those executives the Julian Schnabels and Mary Boones stand.

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