Elizabeth Peyton at the New Museum

Elizabeth Peyton paints lovely portraits of her friends and other young, beautiful people (hence the exhibition's title: Live Forever). The paintings look like watercolors but aren't: they're composed with oils -- dripping, wet oils that give the subjects a juvenile (everyone looks so young) yet shimmering (everyone looks so alive, even as they lounge and repose and sulk) presence. The personal nature of her project -- to document her contemporaries -- reminded us of Nan Goldin's work, although obviously Peyton paints peaceful scenes and Goldin photographs violent, brutal ones. Still, both artists invoke the importance of narrative in all figurative work: we have to supply a story in order to transcend the passivity of looking.