I’ve long been fascinated by artist and poet Cristine Brache’s paintings. I first saw them on Instagram, bunny-eared Playboy models rendered through ghostly magenta and cerulean. When I attended the opening night of her newest exhibition titled Centerfolds (showing at Bernheim Gallery in London from 12 February until 2 April), I couldn’t get close enough to the paintings – something about them kept me away. They’re phantom images, glowing like a television set far away, almost vapour-like. They’re the ghosts of porno past.
Her Playboy subjects are famous women; famous for their legs, their breasts, their skin, their image. But through Brache’s glacial soft-focus, achieved through delicate strokes of oil and ink underneath thick layers of encaustic wax, the women become anonymous. Traces of retro porn kitsch are still visible through the tender distortions: bright orange nail polish, cherry red lips, the hot pink of their sexualised leporidae corsets. But their faces are just faces, bereft of true identity, turning the sexual images that once ruled our visual culture into hauntological objects, half-exposed Polaroids, a wet dream dried up.
The identity of Brache’s main character however, is undeniable: it’s Dorothy Stratten, a woman who went from a teenager working in a Dairy Queen to a Playboy sex symbol to being murdered by her psychotic ex-husband all within three years. Stratten’s late years were a kaleidoscopic nightmare of misogyny, objectification, and abuse. Upon discovering that Stratten was also a poet, Cristine had found a muse – and a poem of hers even features in Cristine’s second poetry collection Goodnight Sweet Thing (2024), which reads “The only sacrifice / To live in this heaven / This Disneyland / Where people are the games.”
Three years after Stratten’s murder, Bob Fosse directed a biopic based on Stratten’s life, career, and demise in a film called Star 80, which features Cristine’s secondary muse – Mariel Hemingway’s depiction of Dorothy Stratten. She’s the mythical Dorothy, the only Dorothy who is depicted as herself, an intelligent and ambitious person. Cristine mourns both realities of Dorothy Stratten – the demise of the person and the demise of her image. Nobody remembers the slain Playboy bunny, although Fosse’s tragic flick has garnered a cult status. And a large part of Brache’s work is about correcting that – but it’s not easy, nor should it be.
For years, Brache has dedicated herself to depicting the haunted house of mirrors that is Hollywood and the porno industry – in paintings such as Trophy Winners, After The Pageant and Table Dancing, Brache shows us women showered in camera flashes and validation, tactically employed by industry predators. We know the real prize is the soul – and it’s been sold. These works, in their almost antiseptic aesthetic, suspend like carcasses drained of all blood. With icy sheens complicated by textural scarring from an orbital sander, the crystallised images appear like looking through teary eyes. The porn-ghosts which glow within the canvas guide the viewer toward central works depicting Stratten, the metaphorical matriarch of Brache’s entire body of work.
Often displayed as diptychs, Brache combines real centerfolds featuring Stratten and Star 80’s recreations of the iconic photos – and in the process, prompts the viewer to interrogate the falsehood of filmic images. Which is the real Dorothy Stratten? Did we ever see the real Dorothy Stratten? Brache paints both the real, nude Stratten and the reimagined, naked Stratten – the difference is the former is without clothes and the latter is ashamed without clothes.