Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Elizabeth Peyton (born in 1965) embodies everything I love and hate about contemporary art—and that is precisely why she deserves our attention. This American artist, with her portraits that are both precious and nonchalant, offers us a vision of the world as fascinating as it is irritating, as brilliant as it is superficial.
Let’s start with what immediately catches the eye: her painting technique. Those fluid brushstrokes, those surfaces smooth as glass—achieved through successive layers of gesso meticulously sanded down to a near-mirror finish—create a visual signature that is instantly recognizable. It’s as if Peyton has found a way to paint with liquid honey, giving her subjects an ethereal aura oscillating between melancholy and glamour. But don’t be fooled: this apparent technical simplicity conceals a sophisticated mastery of the medium.
What particularly strikes me is her treatment of the gaze in her portraits. Her subjects—whether Kurt Cobain, Frida Kahlo, or a close friend—consistently avert their eyes from the viewer. This deliberate distancing evokes Heidegger’s concept of “withdrawal” (Entzug), where the very essence of being paradoxically reveals itself in its act of eluding. It is precisely in this play of absence and presence that Peyton excels, transforming her portraits into visual meditations on the fleeting nature of contemporary identity.
Take her obsession with youth and beauty. Her subjects are frozen in a state of perpetual grace, like butterflies pinned in a display case. This fixation might seem superficial—and it probably is, in part—but it also reveals a profound anxiety about temporality. Walter Benjamin spoke of the aura as “the appearance of a distance, however close the object that calls it forth may be”. Peyton’s portraits embody this tension perfectly: they capture the precise moment when youth begins to fade, fame starts to wane, and beauty begins to dissipate.
Her choice of subjects—rock stars, artists, close friends—constitutes a personal pantheon reflecting the tastes of a certain New York cultural elite of the 1990s. This is both her strength and her limitation. Peyton creates what Roland Barthes called a contemporary “mythology”, transforming popular figures into timeless icons. But unlike Andy Warhol, who used mechanical repetition to drain his subjects of substance, Peyton infuses hers with a disquieting intimacy, almost voyeuristic in nature.
Peyton’s color palette—those deep blues, delicate pinks, emerald greens—creates an atmosphere reminiscent of the Italian Primitives while remaining resolutely contemporary. It’s as if she painted under the influence of an Instagram filter before one even existed. This approach to color recalls Goethe’s theories on chromatic perception: each hue becomes a vehicle for pure emotion.
Her treatment of pictorial space is equally fascinating. The often abstract or barely sketched backgrounds create tension with the meticulous rendering of faces. This spatial dichotomy evokes Deleuze’s concept of the “plane of immanence”, where figure and ground merge into a unified pictorial reality. Peyton’s portraits are not so much representations as manifestations of a certain way of being in the world.
What strikes me most is her ability to transform banal photographs into paintings that transcend their source. Knowing that mechanical reproduction can diminish an artwork’s aura, Peyton reverses the process: she takes mass-produced media images and restores their unique aura through her painterly sensitivity.
But let’s be frank: there is something deeply irritating about her work. This endless fascination with youthful beauty, this romanticization of pop culture, this obsession with a certain form of cultural elitism—all of it could easily tip into preciosity. And yet, it is precisely this tension between superficiality and depth that makes her work so relevant to our times.
Her practice raises questions about the nature of contemporary portraiture. In the age of selfies and digital filters, what does it mean to paint a face? Peyton shows us that the portrait can still be an act of revelation, even—or perhaps especially—when it plays with the codes of pop culture and media representation.
Peyton transforms banality into transcendence. Her portraits are not so much depictions of people as manifestations of a certain zeitgeist, capturing the spirit of an era where celebrity, intimacy, and identity are inextricably intertwined. Her work is both a mirror of our collective fascination with youth and beauty and a subtle meditation on the fleeting nature of these ideals.
And to those who think contemporary art must necessarily be conceptual or politically engaged, I say: look again. In a world saturated with images, true radicalism might lie in this ability to transform the familiar into something strangely beautiful and unsettling. Elizabeth Peyton achieves this with disconcerting grace, even if it sometimes annoys us. And that is precisely why she deserves our critical attention.