Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s voice hints at what type of lover she might be; it’s husky and deep, given texture by the packs of Marlboros that so frequently make appearances in her Instagram photographs, along with The River, her kitten. There’s a painting in “Wild and Blue,” an exhibition of her work at Marlborough Contemporary open through October 7, that does the same. Entitled Sarah (2017), it shows Dupuy-Spencer with her legs unshaven, her pubic hair escaping from the edges of her white underwear, lying in the arms of her girlfriend, Sarah, in a sun-filled apartment. It is a self-portrait, and also a love letter. The look on Dupuy-Spencer’s face? Pure bliss. I have never been with a woman, and the painting makes the absence clear.
I first encountered Dupuy-Spencer’s work at the Whitney Biennial. I never even noticed Open Casket, the painting of Emmett Till that caused so much controversy. Instead, I left the show with Dupuy-Spencer on my mind. Her paintings were like photographs of emotions. The titles — Fall With Me For A Million Days (My Sweet Waterfall) — like a song you can’t stop listening to after a break up. They were sticky with something I don’t ever talk about — all of the falling in love that I’ve done, which I carry around with me all of the time.
Her show at Marlborough includes recent works made since the gallery approached her in April. Dupuy-Spencer told me that she normally takes anywhere between six months to a year-and-a-half to complete a painting. For the exhibition, her first solo show in New York, she had the summer. “It was really hard, and super fun,” she told me. “The paintings just got ripped out of me.”
When I asked her if there was a theme, she told me that they reflected her position politically. When pressed what that position was, she said, “I’m having a conversation in my paintings, but I don’t want to…I don’t like men, I don’t want to be like, ‘This is how it is!’” she said. “I am super critical of that kind of power structure.”
Dupuy-Spencer hasn’t done enough interviews to have developed a clean narrative about herself; and this is fine, she’s not a marketing expert, she’s a painter, and her medium is wordless. From my reading, I would say Dupuy-Spencer is critical of bigotry, white supremacy, police violence and the patriarchy, but also loving towards the white working class, which often gets blamed for all of the above.
Born and raised in Rhinebeck, New York, before it became, as Dupuy-Spencer puts it, “the Upper East Side,” she is nostalgic for the community of poets, writers, carpenters and artisans she grew up around. “They were really good, hard workers,” Dupuy Spencer says. Her father was a writer; her mother hailed from New Orleans.
“I want to talk about class without romanticizing it,” Dupuy-Spencer told me. “In this climate where liberal people are calling white Americans deplorable as if that’s a thing, and also laying all of this blame, I also want to be able to talk about whiteness without excusing it for the problems it does cause.”
All of the paintings in the show are worth seeing; certain ones stand out. Rokeby (2017) depicts an estate where Dupuy-Spencer hung out as a kid. Owned by Ricky Aldridge, Dupuy-Spencer told me that the property been “passed down through generations long after the money has been gone.” In the painting, a group of people hang out on the porch of the main house. What stands out is the tenderness shown by men towards children in the composition — one man caresses the back of a baby’s head. Two others look off into the distance while children lean against them. In the center of it all, Ricky Aldridge, sitting in a chair, looks at the viewer as if he knows we’re there. The painting shows the type of community that so many people fantasize about finding in today’s fractured world; it shows men as good fathers.
White males are many things in today’s culture — mansplainers, Bernie Bros, mass killers, the Alt-Right, power under threat of extinction — but they are almost never the tender beings shown in Rokeby. In “Wild and Blue,” Dupuy-Spencer, a queer white woman who says she doesn’t like men, makes space for white maleness to be loved.
In R. DiMeo III (2017), a skinny white guy with a hoop earring and a receding hairline — the sort of person you see more often in mug shots than art — is depicted holding a baby deer. This is Dupuy-Spencer’s first love; the first person she ever kissed. “I found him on Facebook through his sister,” she told me. “I didn’t know if he was alive. I was waiting to see this face… he’s suffered addiction, and he’s had a tough go of it. And all of a sudden this picture pops up, and he’s holding a baby deer looking as sweet as can be.” Her voice, as she says the last part, softens so much that in the recording, it almost sounds like she’s crying.
Dupuy-Spencer told me she set out to paint what she loved, and in doing so, created her most political work yet. The politics are there — where are they not, these days? — but the love, more so. Are they great paintings? I don't feel qualified to answer that. They stick with me still, two weeks after we talked.
