Jason Cytacki’s visually compelling cowboy paintings, on view at the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, New York, have appeal for diverse audiences: lovers of art of the American West, classic Western movie buffs, and those fascinated with Americana. The exhibition, Enduring Legend, Fragile Myth: Cowboy Paintings by Jason Cytacki, is comprised of twenty-two paintings in three related series, which are intermingled in one gallery.

The first series—the toy series—is from Cytacki’s MFA thesis, and consists of six large paintings, which are based on photographs of dioramas that feature toy cowboys placed in suburban neighborhoods. The meticulously rendered cowboys are too big for the airless, nighttime spaces they inhabit, and the paintings exude a Hopper-esque feeling of isolation and entrapment. The paintings in the toy series are complemented by a group of twelve portraits of Hollywood cowboys and one large self-portrait of the artist as a cowboy. Most of these portraits, rendered in oil or ink, are bust-length and feature realistically yet expressionistically rendered figures. The portraits appear on light backgrounds, with the figures’ faces and torsos partially obscured by dripping and smudged pigments. The final series consists of three paintings of Western landscapes, which are also based on photographs of dioramas made by Cytacki.

Curator James Peck encourages viewers to contemplate Cytacki’s engagement with the enduring legend and fragile myth of the iconic American cowboy, as is explained in the exhibition’s only textual panel. The real American cowboy of the late 1880s, the text states, was transformed into myth by twentieth-century popular culture, including films, dime novels, and television. While not mentioned in the wall text, turn-of-the-century artists—including Frederic Remington and Charles Marion Russell, both of whom are well represented in the Rockwell’s robust permanent collection—also facilitated this transformation. The mythic cowboy has two sides: on the one hand, he is heroic, manly, confident, and full of purpose; on the other, he is tragic, fragile, and tormented, an outsider who feels misunderstood and beleaguered by “the strictures and confines of civilization.” Peck argues that Cytacki’s paintings “tap into the mythic as well as the tragic, fragile nature of the iconic American cowboy.” Cytacki’s works, particularly his portraits of Hollywood cowboys, indeed riff on the myth of the manly, heroic cowboy, but they also explore the fractures embedded in the myth and its perpetuation in American culture. The cowboys that resonate in the minds of most Americans, after all, are Hollywood actors who play the role of cowboy for their audiences—rhinestone cowboys—and their performances have been long geared toward consumer culture. Cytacki’s ironic mythic cowboys appease, resist, and fall victim to the very culture that created them.

The series of toy cowboys in suburban settings speaks to this irony, but does so with a whimsy that never makes the paintings feel heavy-handed or preachy. This is due, in part, to the technical process through which the toy paintings were created, which is explained to visitors by Cytacki in a ten-minute video that plays continuously in the gallery. (The artist is charming and thoughtful, making the video enjoyable to watch and yielding insights into the objects on view. That said, it might have been better if the video were shorter and contained a pause between loops to allow the paintings to be viewed without distraction.) Using toys remembered from his childhood, Cytacki created small dioramas in which one plastic actor is posed in an outdoor setting made of hand-painted cardboard houses, trees, and other props. The constructed nature of the setting is most apparent in the trees, which were cut from corrugated cardboard and drawn in a child-like manner. The paintings are based on digital photographs of these staged scenes. In most of the toy paintings, the cowboys either create quiet havoc or are ensnared by the confines of suburbia. In Don’t Look Back (2010), for instance, the toy cowboy—dressed in Bermuda shorts, work boots, and a holster around his red, collared shirt—seems to have knocked over a stack of logs, perhaps a fence, as he wanders a dim, residential street. The figure in High Lonesome Throne (2011) is similarly destructive as he sits on a train he presumably has played a role in derailing. There is no malice in the dispassionate actors’ destruction; instead, the towering figures seem trapped in spaces they long to escape. This is most evident in All Tied Up (2011), in which the figure lies on the ground, entangled in a classic 1980s Nintendo game controller. Cytacki’s cowboys thus act as a foil to the rugged men of action that populate American visual culture, such as those depicted by Remington and Russell.

Cytacki’s other paintings—the expressionistic portraits and cardboard landscapes—also resonate with the interpretive framework offered by the curator. They tap into the cowboy myth’s fragility by questioning its durability (in the case of the portraits) and by highlighting its rootedness in fabrication (in the case of the landscapes). The memorializing portraits of Hollywood cowboys are intriguingly wry. It is telling that Cytacki chose to feature dated and lesser-known Hollywood stars rendered in classic cowboy getup, who, in all but one case, are not identified in the titles. Many of these men—including Tom Mix, William Hart, and Tom Tyler—performed in some of the earliest silent Westerns. Others, like Randolph Scott and Ray Corrigan, performed in early Western serials. Others, such as Robert “Bob” Crawford, were television stars, or wrote popular Western hit songs, such as Hank Williams. It seems significant that many of these cowboy personalities were in movies alongside Western megastars like John Wayne—big names Cytacki has chosen not to feature—and none had a career that lasted later than the early 1960s. As someone born during the Reagan era, the artist likely did not grow up idolizing these figures. Western stars like John Wayne, Paul Newman, or even Roy Rogers might resonate with a generation X-er, but would Tom Tyler? In the exhibition video, Cytacki acknowledges that the television and movie cowboys that stimulated his imagination as a child were not drawn from “classic” Westerns, but rather were from popular movies like Back to the Future II and cowboy-types like Spiderman and Batman. Cytacki’s portraits address both the superficiality of the cowboy myth and the fleetingness of fame and collective memory. The dripping and smudged paint, which partially obscures the portraits’ realistically rendered faces, questions the strength and durability of these men and their legacies. His manly heroes are distant memories and apparitions. Men who were once icons are now cartoons of cowboyness and fading clichés.

Cytacki’s paintings engage with the theme of memory. While the curator focuses on mass-mediated, public memory, it is clear that these paintings also probe the intimacies of personal memory. One’s memories, the exhibition suggests, are simultaneously vivid and selective, and both delight and frustrate. In the video, Cytacki explains that the heroic cowboy he idolized as a child profoundly influenced the way he saw the world. The toy paintings recreate childhood play: they reflect the many hours he spent imagining cowboy dramas in his suburban home of South Bend, Indiana. Yet, these paintings do not bottom out in nostalgia. The toy series suggests with melancholy that it is difficult, if not impossible, to recreate the wonderment and naiveté of one’s childhood imagination. There is something eerie, even gloomy, about the series, in part because of Cytacki’s decision to render the paintings as night scenes. Children are able to suspend belief for the sake of imagination, not getting caught up in the complexities of the characters they inhabit. But when one confronts the fact that the American cowboy is one part reality and ten parts imagination, and sees Hollywood cowboys as pure fabrication and acknowledges that the taming of the West was an act of ruthless imperialism, it is all but impossible to return to a state of imaginative innocence. Cytacki paints the heroic cowboy of his childhood imagination as both hapless captive of memory and unwitting destroyer of innocence. The toy cowboys’ disruptive presence becomes a metaphor for the inevitable disturbances in even one’s most cherished memories.

The most compelling painting in the exhibition is Cytacki’s Large Self Portrait (2012). It is painted in a realistic yet expressionistic style like the other cowboy portraits, but on a much larger scale. The artist, sporting a handlebar mustache (as he does in the video) and an embroidered denim shirt, looks dispassionately at the viewer with half-open eyes. His head, which dominates the canvas, rests sideways in a dripping pool of murky brownish paint, which is the color of his skin and hair and looks like dried blood. Despite the painting’s allusions to the tragic yet heroic deaths of cowboy protagonists, it is neither grim nor grievous. While it might be tempting to interpret the work as representing the artist as an outsider—the hackneyed trope of the lonesome cowboy-artist—the work is more ironic than this. This is not the face of the defeated or marginalized, but of a clever millennial hipster. The painting has the presence of Chuck Close’s cool and confrontational portraits, but with a wink.

In Large Self Portrait, Cytacki plays cowboy, presenting himself, ironically, as a tragic cowboy-artist. Although his early career has played out in the borderlands of the United States’s New York-centric art world, it would be difficult to cast him as a tormented outsider cowboy who has been shunned or defeated by society. After all, he received his MFA in 2011 from the University of Notre Dame and soon thereafter became assistant professor of painting at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Art and Art History. The similarity in style between Cytacki’s self-portrait and the other cowboy portraits implies that he identifies with these characters in some way, but there is reason to believe that this identification goes beyond the myth of the cowboy. Perhaps what drew the artist to Hollywood’s fading cowboy stars has something to do with the idea that collective memory has failed them. Cytacki seems to ask if he will be defeated by time and memory like the men in his paintings. Will he be forgotten, or perhaps worse, will he be remembered as a type or cliché? The sophistication with which the artist handles a trope as well worn as the Western cowboy and the technical strength of the paintings suggests otherwise. Cytacki has the depth and potential that may well lead to his own “enduring legacy.”