David Humphrey by Karen Wilkin as published in Partisan Review, Spring 2000 Like Tuttle, David Humphrey is fascinated by the tension between what is literally present in a picture, what you are conditioned to read as illusion, and an ineffable zone somewhere between the two. His firmly constructed, but unstable images, seen at McKee Gallery, depend on layers of elegantly drawn and painted fragments, each with its own scale, viewpoint, and often, painting language, all presented in delicate marzipan colors. Equivocal bits of heads, hands, and voluptuous torsos pulse in and out of each other, changing scales and relationships, as though these static configurations were morphing into different spatial zones. Bleeds of paint gather themselves into crisply drawn fusions of the mechanical and the erotic before subsiding into paint again. A chandelier seems to thrust one branch out of the plane of the canvas, as though propelled by the force of a cropped, swirling nude beneath it, who dissolves into a diaphanous spray of pigment. At once playful and disturbing, these beautifully painted pictures challenge both the literal flatness of the canvas and the fictions of illusionistic painting.