Edouard Duval-Carrié, Le monde actuel, ou Erzulie interceptée (The World at Present, or Ezili Intercepted), 1996, Bass Museum of Art

With the recent events developing in Haiti, the complicated history between the country and the United States has quickly surfaced. A group of American Baptists attempted to transport Haitian children out off the country without proper documentation causing an international media storm and a recent article from UK Guardian journalist Seumas Milne’s which questioned the U.S. Military’s motivation in “[commandeering] Port-au-Prince’s airport…[turning] away flights bringing medical equipment and emergency supplies from organizations…in order to give priority to landing troops.” This latent disregard seems to also be seeping into the discussion of the country’s history of art as well. In the earthquake’s aftermath, it is difficult to argue the importance of salvaging this artistic history while the reality of the devastation and number of lives lost continues to reveal itself. Yet, the recent foray of two U.S. media publications into this realm, and the aforementioned events, has led me to believe that the need for this discussion has come to us sooner rather than later.  It is the apparent unfamiliarity with Haitian culture, in this case, its art, that is most problematic and results in its artists and history to undergo further marginalization. By using its artistic history as a window into its national identity, hopefully, Haiti can be defined as more than one of the world’s poorest countries.

On January 24^th, the Los Angeles Times reported the destruction of the Centre d’Art, a historical art center founded in Port-au-Prince in 1944, which helped to launch Haitian artists onto the international art scene. There are two major problems with the article that need to be discussed further. The first is the usage of the term “primitive.” This label was used to define Haitian artists by the founders of the Centre d’Art (two Americans and a Frenchman) as a way to market said artists within the international scene. The trend in the art world during this time was to find the next great “primitive” artist, an influence of Dada and Surrealist artistic movements that sought to reclaim an innocence felt to have been lost with the industrialization of Europe. Haitian artists who were willing to be perceived through this European/American hegemonic gaze could find a place within the international art market.

Centre d'Art damage (Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times / January 23, 2009)

However, there is a long tradition of Haiti’s creolized academic tradition of which a formal, figurative style in Haitian painting can be traced back to. Philomé Obin (1892 – 1986) had been painting thirty years before the center opened and is still considered one of the most influential artists on Haitian art today. His work stands as an example of the school of memorializing well-known events within Haiti’s revolutionary history, frequently referencing Haitian heroes such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Charlemagne Péralte. Obin championed the school of nationalist art in Haiti and his influence can still be seen today in works by internationally known artists such as Edouard Duval-Carrié. To continue to refer to these artists and their works as “primitive” in this day and age without any context, as did the Los Angeles Times journalist Tracy Wilkinson, is, well, just plain lazy.

The second problematic area of the Los Angeles Times article, and in which we can also refer to the New Yorker’s January 25^th cover, is the continued use of the world “voodoo” when referring to the Haitian religion of vodou (also known as vaudou). The cover featured the painting The Resurrection of the Dead from contemporary Haitian artist Frantz Zephirin (a grand-nephew of Obin). The painting depicts imagery of vodou guide (“gods”), as they guard the passage between life and death. Both publications use the term “voodoo”, a Western construct laden with racial prejudice, with no further explanation of its immense role within Haitian art history or the formation of its national identity. Vodou is a combination of West African and Roman Catholic religions, comprised of deities, or lwas, which through worship, help practitioners get closer to the supreme god, Bondeyé. In her article Vodou, Nationalism, and Performance: The Staging of Folklore in Mid-Twentieth Century Haiti, Kate Ramsey discusses the role of the religion in the formation of the indigènisme movement, a conceptual rallying point for revolution against the U.S. occupation of 1915, rooted in ethnic and cultural identity. The religion was criminalized and those who observed its ceremonies were persecuted, forcing vodou to go underground and evolve into a locale of resistance for Haitians. During this time, vodou would become exoticized by American/European artists searching to connect to the “other”, such as choreographer Katherine Dunham and avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, best known for Divine Horseman: the Living Gods of Haiti, a film documenting vodou ceremonial rituals and practitioners.

Frantz Zephirin, The Resurrection of the Dead (2007), On the cover of the January 25, 2010 of "New Yorker" magazine

Once vodou became legal in 1946, the Centre d’Art encouraged its artists to incorporate religious imagery within their artwork, as it was perceived as purely authentic (read “primitive”). Haitian artists who made the conscientious decision to allow themselves to be labeled as “other,” were able to achieve success within the international market. A prime example is the artist Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), who through acceptance of the role projected onto him, exhibited in Paris and New York frequently and could claim patrons such as André Breton (father of the Surrealist movement) and American author Truman Capote. In his 2000 lecture, Voodoo Terror: (mis)representations of voodoo and western cultural anxieties, presented at the October Gallery in London, John Cussans discusses the “voodoo construct” and its four different distinctions: the voodoo doll; the zombie; the voodoo witch doctor; and voodoo possession. Through these continued representations, Cussans argues, vodou has been continually objectified and suppressed by U.S./European culture and its continued need to ethnographically “authenticate,” (or define through a Western gaze), what they don’t understand. Cussans concluded, “It is this tendency to return voodoo to vodou that must be reversed if we are to resist the compassionate continuation of vodou’s suppression effected by the misguided will to authenticity.” In other words, any concept of voodoo must be abandoned when approaching the Haitian religion; otherwise, we are doing nothing more than participating in the continued misrepresentation. This is the problem with the U.S. media publications. So ingrained in the American psyche has this misrepresentation become, these journalists didn’t even think to research the religion.

Hector Hypplite (1894-1948), La dauration l'amour (The Adoration of Love), 1946-48, in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum

The Centre d’Art and local galleries have reported the loss of many artworks contained in their collective walls, not to mention a number of represented artists. The recent tragedy has made Haiti the world’s disaster darling and it has been tremendous how people from all over the world have responded to the country’s need for help. Yet, we need to take a collective breath and become aware that we are treading on complicated ground.  The lack of reference to any real historical, artistic or political context from both publications highlights the challenging areas that arise whenever a Western power has offered aid to Haiti. We cannot sustain meaning as a global community if we keep repeating the historic mistakes of colonization. As we go forward, we need to raise our awareness to include the entire story, not fixing Haitians and their history in a marginalized space, putting aside our preconceived notions in order to truly help Haiti. If not, I guarantee, we will have another revolution on our hands.

As a painter of political ideas—and, often, the grotesque and cruel—Luc Tuymans is a historian of images that appear banal but reveal sinister workings: colored blobs are actually disembodied eyeballs; a bare room with flattened perspective is the site of uncountable murders; a limp cloth turns out to be the emblem of a growing nationalist movement. His first U.S. retrospective, a mid-career survey now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is installed in chronological order, rewarding the viewer with a sense of how his ideas developed for each series. To mark this notable event, Mr. Tuymans conducted a personal tour of the galleries, illuminating his process and the themes behind each work. He concluded the tour with the remark, “I am not interested in having power. I am interested in looking at power.”

La correspondance (Correspondence), 1985. 31.5 x 47.5 inches (80 x 120 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“I stopped painting from 1981 to 1985 because it became too suffocating and too existential. And somebody by accident shoved a Super-8 camera in my hands and I started to film. And then I came back. Making images is important in the sense that you need distance.”

“This was the first painting made after the film adventure [above]. And it’s actually one of my most conceptual works, and it’s based upon an anecdote. The anecdote is from a Dutch writer who was stationed in the Dutch Embassy from 1905 to 1910. And he didn’t have enough money to bring his wife over to Berlin. And in those days you had the grand cafes with very bourgeois interiors, and also postcards taken of them. So every time he went to eat in such places he bought a postcard, and with a red pencil he crossed out the table at which he had eaten, and he sent it to his wife during the duration of five years. So that’s why it’s called correspondence. It’s also the idea of persistence, and homesickness without an end.”

Die Wiedergutmachung (Reparations), 1989. 17.75 x 21.625, 15 x 17.75 inches (45 x 55, 38 x 45 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“This is something I saw on television. It’s called the Weidergutmachung, and it’s about the woman who made the documentary, it was made in ‘89, which is when I saw the documentary on the West German television. It was quite an interesting documentary because Weidergutmachung means the pay-back system towards the people who suffered in the concentration camps…this time not the Jewish people, but Gypsy twins on which the German doctors in the concentration camps had experimented. These people were never paid back because the guy who was actually responsible for the whole situation of the repayment was also a doctor who himself experimented on them during the times he was working in the concentration camp. When he dies off in ‘83 in his bureau drawer, the woman who was making the documentary found contact prints of disengaged eyeballs and hands. So this is what I saw on the television screen. It was such a poignant element that I turned it into a more organic imagery.”

Gaskamer (Gas Chamber), 1986; oil on canvas; 24 x 32 1/2 in. (61 x 82.5 cm); The Over Holland Collection. In honor of Caryl Chessman; © Luc Tuymans; photo: Peter Cox, courtesy The Over Holland Collection

“The most problematic painting that I ever painted—that I ever will paint as long as I live, probably—is the Gas Chamber. The Gas Chamber was derived from a visit to in Dachau where you have a real gas chamber and not a replica. And I stood in it, and I made a watercolor when I visited it, and for years this watercolor was on the floor of my studio, which made the color of the paper yellow. And I also made it on a frame that is deliberately not straight. It’s a metonymous image, because without the words of the title it would be completely without effect, it would be just a painting. Nevertheless, it shows the triviality of that type of horror. At the time of its use, it was masked as a place where you could get a shower. All the elements of perspective are taken out, in order to get to this feeling of claustrophobic existence. I mean, a lot of times the Germans say, ‘We can’t deal with that type of history as the Holocaust,’ but I’m not agreeing with that, it is part of the culture… This remains a very difficult and ambiguous painting.”

The Flag, 1995. 54.375 x 30.75 inches (138.1 x 78.1 cm). © Luc Tuymans. Image via the excellent Luc Tuymans, edited by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, ISBN 978-1-933045-98-6.

“This was from a show about Flemish nationalism in my hometown, where at that point (luckily not anymore) there was the biggest concentration of the right-wing political party called the Flemish Bloc. So I thought I would start with their icons. This is the Belgian lion. The Belgian lion normally is a lion on a yellow backdrop with red claws. To enlighten you about the history of Flanders is going to take us very long, because it’s a long story to begin with, but anyway, to give you an idea…During the first world war, all the officers were French speaking. This meant that during the First World War a lot of Belgian people died in that war, millions of them. The people who were the soldiers, the foot guys, they were all Flemish; there were huge massacres, because when the officers would say a gauche [French: left], they would go right, into the machine fire. In between the two world wars there was a closeness in terms of culture to the German culture, more than to the French culture. And that ended up in a collaboration with the Germans. So a very difficult situation. That’s why you have a lot of marriage trouble, which I also witnessed. My mother was Dutch, they were in the resistance. My father was the Flemish side, they had collaborated. At dinner, when I was five years old, this explodes by the accidental showing up of a photograph of the guy I was named after doing the Hitler salute. You can imagine the whole situation. So what you can see here is the Flemish lion, and I just made a watercolor of it, and then I crumbled it together, and then pinned it on the wall. And then I did something I had never done before, I took a Polaroid of it, and it was such bad quality that it totally deleted the imagery, which is actually beautiful I think. And this was the first time I used Polaroid as a device to derive imagery.”

Ballroom Dancing, 2005; oil on canvas; 62 1/4 x 40 3/4 (158 x 103.5); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, fractional and promised gift of Shawn and Brook Byers; © Luc Tuymans

“This was painted out of my disgust with the Bush legislation. The first idea I had was this: I was thinking of this element of regression in American society in those days, going back to an open form of conservatism, and therefore Fred Astaire, Ginger Rodgers. Ballroom dancing. So then I was on the web browsing, trying to find more contemporary imagery, and in 2005 there was the Texas Governor’s ball, this is the Texas seal, the woman swings her head out, this guy is the epitome of well-behaved and whatever. And on the other hand, this is an image that’s really classical, I really loved doing it…”

The Secretary of State, 2005; oil on canvas; 18 x 24 1/4 in. (45.7 x 61.5 cm); Collection the Museum of Modern Art, New York, promised gift of David and Monica Zwirner; courtesy David Zwirner, New York; © Luc Tuymans

“…Then, one of my best friends who used to be the Minster of Foreign Affairs, made a remark of Condoleeza Rice—I was in a bar, reading this in a newspaper—there was a day Condoleeza Rice came and visited our country, and he said something like, “She is very intelligent, and she is not unpretty.” And this sexist remark led to my idea of Condoleeza Rice. The interesting point is that she is depicted not to be judged, she is depicted with great determination. At that point no one knew what the woman was going to achieve.”

Olafur Eliasson’s Multiple Shadow House opened Thursday, February 11th at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.  Eliasson, who has been described as “an ecstasy-inducing Danish-Icelandic artist,” has perfected the concept of smoke and mirror art that consistently wows its audience and draws crowds (including a Michael Bloomberg and numerous body guards).   The packed opening felt a bit like Disney World meets the hands-on section of a science museum; particularly because the exhibition involves the viewer in a collaborative creative process.  Opening attendees played obsessively with their color-split shadows on the wall, made shadow puppets with their hands and basically behaved as if this was the first time they had even seen light divided into color spectrums or their own corporeal outline for that matter.  This  behavior illustrates Eliasson’s emphasis on the visitor’s experience and his tendency to create work in which the potential lies in the exchange between the piece and the viewer.

Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

The first floor of the two-floor exhibit consists of clusters of rooms comprised of a simple wooden framework supporting large projection screens.  Each room allows for the viewer to stand in front of projected light, thus causing the light to fracture into colored shadows on the wall.  These projections, like much of Eliasson’s work, causes the viewer to re-examine even the most common familiarities, such as light, with renewed appreciation and wonder.  Eliasson is particularly interested in how we understand, see, and experience space. Multiple Shadow House does not disappoint on this level. The user negotiates and constructs his or her own surroundings while experiencing subtleties of color, thrill of participation, and magic of science.

The theme of perception of visual imagery and viewer involvement is continued upstairs in Intangible Afterimage Star (2008).  Six spotlights project geometrical forms in magenta, blue, yellow, green, magenta, and turquoise onto a wall, layering and intersecting.  As explained in the press release, “the intense projections fade in and out, and complimentary afterimages stay on the visitor’s retina and appear to multiply the color compositions.  As a result, the film is only partially produced by the spotlight’s projection; the rest is contributed by the viewer.”

Also upstairs is a stunning collection of what appear to be studies in color, sequences, and shape done in watercolor and pencil on paper.  Minimal and intimate, these stationary works are a refreshing change from the rest of the exhibition.  Configured in sequences, the watercolors use ellipses and circles as narrative exercises on the perception of space and movement.  Another piece, Colour Experiment no. 3, is a circular oil painting that at first glance appears to be a basic study in color or a large color wheel.  However, the painting is actually an expansion of the traditional model of a color wheel, wherein each of the 360 degrees is painted in one color and corresponds to its complementary afterimage located directly across from itself.

Eliasson has cited the work of close friend Einar Thorstein, a philosopher, scientist, and engineer, as a constant source of his visual vocabulary.  He has found inspiration in Thorstein’s spatial ideas such as geodesic domes, fivefold symmetries, spiral spheres, towers and pavilions, the golden ratio, and kaleidoscopes.  Eliasson uses these concepts to create works like Multiple Shadow House which exist as experiences more than material objects.  Presented via transparent means of constructions, these experiences illustrate the nature of perception-based stimulation as well as the artist’s ability to manipulate the experience.

Current solo exhibitions for Eliasson include Olafur Eliasson: Your Chance Encounter at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan and Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.

Richard Patterson emerged in London at Damien Hirst’s Freeze exhibition in 1988 as one of the YBA group. After moving to New York he eventually settled in Dallas. He is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery in London and James Cohan Gallery in New York. He is known for paintings that combine imagery culled from popular culture and art history with painstaking detail. Combining car culture, soft porn, modernist design and the viscous seductions of paint, Patterson’s work often evokes both melancholy and desire. Here, Noah Simblist talks to him in his studio about his current paintings. They began by discussing the problems with working with appropriated imagery.

Richard Patterson: There’s so much shit to worry about. That’s what has sort of driven me to generate my own imagery rather than referencing other material because unlike in Germany where everything is seen as fair use, everywhere else it’s not. So it’s a very prohibitive time, you can’t visually comment on the world now in a satirical or ironic way without getting permission first. So, I got good enough in Photoshop where I started realizing that if you already know how to paint and draw you can actually generate stuff from scratch without sampling it.

Noah Simblist: The breasts in the Doge painting are from scratch?

RP: They are absolutely from scratch.

NS: Really?

RP: I decided to adorn these dancers with these slightly crazy, slightly cartoon breasts. And then Bellini’s Doge of Venice appears in the middle. There was a lot of power invested in this one person who is basically elected. I think of him as this benevolent type of prince. That’s not why I did it, but you know, he seems a little like the local collector Howard Rachofsky.

NS: The Doge of Dallas.

RP: The Doge of Dallas and all the breasts you know. These are my fake breasts.

NS: The Dallas fake breasts.

RP: These are the people that inhabit galleries. It’s also like Picasso. It’s the fear of impotence and death and the younger fertile woman you know. Also I think its ridiculous, it’s got a cartoony kind of dumbness to it.

NS: You have said that these paintings are not meant to be purely ironic like the way that Jeff Koons uses appropriated imagery for a sly commentary on contemporary life.

RP: Koons is all about irony. But, there is a melancholy and genuineness, a specific mood in some of my paintings that isn’t there in Koons. Koons is all about the tedious stuff about consumerism.

I think that the American understanding of irony is where you say, “I really like your new sweater…not” My understanding of irony is from English culture, which is entrenched with irony. If you had your country blown to bits in living memory or you parents memory and you’ve seen your country change…We used to have this massive empire and I was brought up to believe that there was still this kind of Great Brittania type shit and then it is so clearly dwindling. How can you not be ironic about the fact that Hitler bombed the shit out of your country. That gives you a kind of cultural irony that is so, English. English culture is shot through with being invaded and assimilating new cultures through its history and then developing a sense of humor about it.

NS: That’s interesting. What you’re talking about relates to our standard history about Dada and Surrealism that was about uncanny contradictory things being put in one place together. The idea of something that seems both funny and horrific at the same time was coming out of World War I or World War II, by people that were being confronted with the most bizarre circumstances. During the Blitz you’d see a burning building and abject destruction but people that lived next to that building still had to go about their daily lives by going to work, doing laundry and grocery shopping. So you have this kind of banal thing that is also epic at the same time.

RP: Well I think so much gets lost in translation and you know I think that there is a default setting that the Brits have that is so self-deprecating, self-questioning, self-doubting and America since 9/11 is going to be more ironic, and maybe intimate as well.

If I did a painting of whatever it was that I was painting – cartoon breasts or something – it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what I wanted to see. In fact, it was often the opposite. I wasn’t painting Spice Girls because I thought Spice Girls were great. Some people say, “You sort of like the bikes and the tits right?” It’s a difficult question cause I do. The red one is a collectible bike that raced in Europe in the sixties and I do like them but the irony is for me to put them into paintings is incredibly bad.

NS: Does this connect to an idea of taste? Is every painting or every work an artist makes an expression of their taste? Similarly, like the curator acquiring something for their museum. Is that an expression of their taste? It seems like you’re saying the opposite. These aren’t just expressions of your own likes or dislikes.

RP: Yeah, taste is a real good thing to talk about cause it’s the most objective thing. It’s the thing that sounds most nebulous, maybe least important and maybe it’s the most important thing. Because in term of these images, not only are they reproduced very, very carefully, when it comes to actually painting them, but a huge amount of work has gone into trying to balance colors and compositions to make them. I mean they are quite classical; the reason I think it looks so weird is because it’s a very classical painting in an age that isn’t. So its difficult to find a context for them. It’s like to trying to talk about Schoenberg to the MTV generation.  Is it possible to paint a bright red Toyota Tacoma truck with these funny bulges, with wheel arches that are really quite ugly that Toyota described in their press release as “muscular bulges” that didn’t look like muscle at all; they looked like rolls of fat around someones middle.

NS: I read something recently about a coup within Toyota where the CEO who was  responsible for bringing out these big trucks and big SUV’s and replacing their traditional model of having smaller fuel efficient cars with these bigger things because it was feeding the American appetite was publicly chastised by Toyota’s grandson. They fell into a lot of the same problems that the American car makers did.  He publicly rebuked him for being greedy and too connected to the dirty obsession with power and size that Americans have and throwing away all the virtues that the company was founded on.

RP: I wrote a piece for Glenn Fuhrman’s show at the Flag Foundation in New York, about something connected to this. Glenn has the Back of the Dealership painting. The title was an obvious pun on paintings being back at the art dealership. But it was also genuine. I kept going back to the Toyota dealership on Sundays to take a look at the trucks when there was no one there. But there was always some salesman, who seemed to be on Sunday duty at the shop trying to sell you a truck and they never knew as much about the truck as I did. They’d tell you it was an eight cylinder truck and it was a six cylinder truck. They never seemed to know what they were talking about. And, then somehow oil was getting more expensive.

I was already locked into that syndrome and I was kind of aware of it and built credit by spending money I did not have just to be taken seriously in America. Politically you don’t have any power unless you’re in debt. So basically all money is debt, and if power is money you can say that power is debt. So owning one of these fucking trucks was contributing to the economy and it was also your license to be fully American. It was clearly fucked up. I think that’s why I wanted to move here. And now of course it’s going to look too obvious because its going to look like its about the economy. If it’s ironic, its going to be about trucks or the economy or something. But I was actually experiencing it as a foreign national in a slightly different way than probably ordinary Americans would.

Postscript: While the above excerpts from a conversation with Patterson covered the complex layering of conceptual tropes in his paintings, the discussion frequently turned to larger issues about living and working in a regional American city like Dallas. Patterson has taken a leading roll in recent years to bring his experiences of participating in an emerging art community in London – which in the mid-80’s was not the art center that it is today – to bear on Dallas. But he also continues to show his work internationally. Most recently he is participating in “Size Does Matter,” an exhibition curated by Shaquille O’Neal which opened on Feb 19 at The Flag Art Foundation in New York.

Lara Viana’s paintings look as if they might have been chiseled down from thick blocks of oil paint, rather than the media having been applied to the surface. The layers of paint in her hauntingly rendered scenes tangle and fold onto one another like rumpled bed sheets. Abandoned dinner parties and smudged, silhouetted flower arrangements are presented in a muted palate that suggests faded memories—so long gone that one might never grasp onto them again. Viana’s new work is currently on view in a solo exhibition at Domo Baal in London—her first solo show at the space, following the 2009 group exhibition, Time is a Sausage.

In an essay for Viana’s recent solo exhibition at Exeter Phoenix, London-based writer, Rebecca Geldard, said of the work, “…back in the studio, and drawn into a Viana Rorschach–image conundrum, one remembers that these works are as much about the nature of living as the removed technical recording of it.”

Lara Viana was born and raised in Salvador, Brazil. She earned her BFA from the UK’s Falmouth School of Art and her MFA from the Painting Department at the Royal College of Art in London She was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2008 and the Whitechapel Gallery’s East End Academy 2009: The Painting Edition. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group shows around London, including at Blyth Gallery, Contemporary Art Projects, Transition Gallery, Tricycle Gallery, and many more. Viana is also currently exhibiting in Psychic Geography at Workplace Gallery in Gateshead.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Hans Holbein, 1521.

Hans Holbein painted The Body of the Dead Christ Laid Out in His Tomb in 1521. In it, Christ’s harrowed face and tortured body don’t actually look dead; they look comatose with pain and on the verge of dying, but not quite gone.  The fact that most of his peers took a more lyrical approach to the crucifixion makes Holbein’s grittiness all the more provoking. In Albrecht Durer’s Lamentation for Christ (1500-1503), Christ is held upright, and though his face looks pained, he still seems capable of posthumously comforting the people around him. In Heironymous Bosch’s Crucifixion with a Donor, Christ’s body seems supernaturally lithe, despite its inhumane positioning. Only Holbein placed Christ all alone and flat on his back.

Holbein’s relentlessly deathly Christ has captivated intellectuals and artists  for centuries. One of them, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, mentions the painting more than once in his melodramatic 1869 social commentary, The Idiot. The character Ippolit, a young man dying of consumption, gives a long-winded speech the night before he fails to commit suicide. He’s impressively incisive when he speaks of Holbein’s work: “Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or . . . as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being.”

David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled (Peter Hujar)," 1989. Courtesy of P.P.O.W. Gallery.

122 years later, David Wojnarowicz, whose depiction of his dying friend Peter Hujar feels uncannily parallel to Holbein’s Christ, tried to tear into that “dumb beast” Ippolit described. Wojnarowicz, like Ippolit, saw nature and man-made systems as weird collaborators. “After witnessing . . . Hujar’s death . . . and after my recent diagnosis [with AIDS], I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical world or concepts designed to make sense of the external world,” wrote Wojnarowicz. He wanted to get to the raw core of a body’s disintegration. “I’m a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or sign or gesture that approximates what I’m sensing,” he continued. If his photograph of Hujar tried to make  a prison break, it didn’t succeed. It still spoke the language of portraits and image planes.

I thought of Wojnarowicz when I  saw John Baldessari’s Blue Line (Holbein) at Margo Leavin Gallery, an exhibition that coolly and minimally rephrases Holbein’s Dead Christ.  Baldessari has always struck me as a savvy manipulator, an artists who reveals language’s limitations through images and imagery’s limitations through language, and doesn’t seem too interested in any truth beyond that. But Blue Line, which confronts the gaping failure of signs and gestures to say anything honest, made me think I’d misread him. Baldessari has confined Holbein’s Christ to an elongated, thinly pristine, blue-rimmed rectangle that angles up against the gallery wall.  Taking in the whole image requires walking the length of the rectangle, maybe even multiple times.

John Baldessari, Installation Shot, 2010. Courtesy of Margo Leavin Gallery, Photo: Brian Forrest.

A clandestine camera records visitors as they navigate the rectangle and the recording’s slightly delayed stream plays on the wall of the next gallery. When you enter that gallery, you are watching yourself watch Dead Christ, further distanced from something that was distancing to begin with. The clean lines of minimalism and the mediation of digital feeds are Baldessari’s beast, the thing Ippolit described and Wojnarowicz fought: the engine that “impassively and unfeelingly” swallows bodily truth.

I have to admit, there is nothing more impressive to me than a well executed painting, and spending some time with the work of Johannes Kahrs has done nothing but revive this fascination. Living somewhere between film, modern news media and history painting, Kahrs’ work seamlessly merges the beauty and tradition of painting and portraiture with banal yet grotesque objectivity, seducing the viewer into a reductive, saturated palate only to confront them with an aggressive yet all too familiar imagery. Choosing images generally experienced through second hand sources of information, Kahrs infuses his paintings and drawings with the drama of film, creating a sense of constant motion and closeness within a still and fragmented plane. Claiming imagery typically referenced through our daily interaction with media sources, Kahrs builds on the diversity of photographic images infused with the seductive palette of artists such as Richter and Tuymans, but invests them with a grotesque, bodily relationship to the viewer seen in the work of Jenny Saville. Kahr’s dark and alluring palette creates an ominous sensation surrounding his shrouded, anonymous figures that instantly builds a narrative within his intentionally extracted context. Kahrs’ film-like color references the emotive palette seen in work such as Luc Tuymans’ Gaskamer, but builds another narrative context that remains familiar but unidentifiable.

Nevertheless, it is his hybridization of media that keeps me coming back to his work. The sensation of moving film, rather than a captured photograph, comes not just from rendering from video stills, but showing sequences of images with a subtle shift in time. Kahrs employs a blurring and shifting of images, but also blurs the identity of his subjects, contributing to his seamless combination of the banal and the grotesque. This obscuring of subjects to a point of abstraction, allowing faces to melt off the subjects like those of Francis Bacon’s portraits, elevates while disguising the identity of the mundane, drawing on our cultural over saturation and disconnection from the physicality of violence. Further complicating his role in creating the image, Kahrs paintings and drawings are often shown behind glass, emphasizing the viewer’s separation from the work and further masking the artist’s hand. This masking and obscuring of time combined with the multiple references to media builds more questions than answers, giving someone a place to investigate and question both the history of painting and its relationship to modern life.

Kahrs recent exhibitions have included solo shows with Luhring Augustine in New York and GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy, in addition to several group shows at the Phoenix Art Museum, the SFMOMA and Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal. Kahrs currently lives and works in Berlin.