Berlinde De Bruyckere / John Currin

DHC/ART presents two concurrent solo exhibitions by Belgian sculptor Berlinde De Bruyckere and American painter John Currin. Although these two figurative artists, who borrow heavily from art history, are joined by what curator John Zeppetelli describes as an “old masterly tradition,” the two are distinctly divided by tone, intention and the direction in which they work. For Currin, allegory and metaphor are fluid and cannot be intended—what is foremost is a “good painting,” and he therefore concerns himself with technique and composition. The genesis of De Bruyckere’s work is concept—a point from which she plans a meticulous trajectory to put a form to monumental, existential questions of “suffering and vulnerability, love and brutality.” The success of her intention, on the occasion of this show, makes for a jarring entrance as one is ill prepared to meet this gravity after spending time with Currin’s enchanting and curious tableaux.

Upon entering De Bruyckere’s show, one is met with Les Deux, 2001, and its placement in the gallery, proximate to the entrance, is an imposing introduction. The piece is composed of two life-sized (or death-sized in their subtle distortions and expansions) sculptures of horses covered in horsehide, stacked on trestles, in a horizontal position, one above the other. The work is for De Bruyckere (and likely few could deny a similar reading) an extreme metaphor for human suffering and torture. Their elevation on the scaffolding provides the perspective of seeing the reposed animal at eye level, and the fact that their bodies are faceless and subtly altered in proportion creates a sense of surrealism and at the same time imbues the fallen creatures with dignity.

On the wall adjacent to, and in front of, this piece are two untitled, figurative wax sculptures suspended on ironwork. Like the horses of Les Deux, these human torsos are faceless, and further, headless. Concerned not with “sex or face, nor with body, but with the spirit,” De Bruyckere feels that faces are too personal and limit her speaking more universally on the human condition. Although they are beautiful, these fragile, distorted human figures, pale in soft pink and blue greys, their feet poised in a position similar to that of the Crucifixion, present a challenge to behold for any length of time. One could imagine the task near impossible should these figures possess heads, making the distance too near and the metaphor something other than the acknowledgement of universal suffering.

In a separate building, a few doors away and part of DHC (and in a whole other world), is a comprehensive collection of John Currin paintings, which does an excellent job in charting the trajectory of the artist, both distinct in direction but meandering in its way. In grad school at Yale, Currin originally wanted to be an abstract artist, admiring and emulating works of artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Although he is certainly not an abstract artist now, he has borrowed something from de Kooning—the idea of process as content. Listening to him speak on his work, delighting in a painter’s lexicon of colour value and light, and visiting the chronologically arranged work, it is clear that Currin is almost entirely concerned with process—to this end, the painting comes first; the narrative and meaning are secondary. It is therefore easy to see how Currin’s primary concern with the painting, as opposed to the viewer’s (over)emphasis on narrative, could provide cause for debate.

John Currin admits that as a young artist he was a fervent believer in “hardcore grand painting,” a faith he somewhat apologetically maintains to this day, having stated “painting is a doomed enterprise if you are an American.” Indeed, American artists may not be known as producers of masterpieces in the sense of grand painting, but what they are very fine producers of is persona. Part of Currin’s persona is this very insecurity of being an American painter working toward his own glorified perspective of European art, unattainable in the sense that the past can never be reclaimed. This insecure character reappears in many of the “middle-aged socialite” paintings and the bizarre pairings of heavily caricatured older men with young women from the early 1990s. These “anxiety-ridden performances” filled with ennui and angst resonate in Currin’s work until it is replaced by happiness (of all things) when he meets his future wife and muse Rachel Feinstein. It is at this point that his paintings take on a luminance, as Currin discovers the “secret” of underpainting. Honeymoon Nude, 1998, which immediately recalls Botticelli’s Birth of Venus but with a distinctly contemporary face, marks the revelation that ignites his fetish for exacting flesh on canvas at an increasingly masterful level. In the way the human body was an exercise in proportion in Classical Greece, for Currin it would become an excuse for perfecting technique. This striving towards mastery provides a less sinister explanation for his penchant for painting what could be read as pornography (for which he also apologizes). It supplies an ample subject matter of limbs intertwined, which the artist is then free to interpret and accentuate with Courbet-like creases and shadows. In fact, Currin’s The Dane, 2006, an erotic scene depicting a woman amorously caressing another before a lushly depicted background that gives subtle hints of setting, could be seen as an accelerated and lucid version of Courbet’s Sleep. In this painting, as in many others, Currin gives equal attention to the trappings of time and place and to the figure itself, interpreting arrangements of objects and accessories in a meticulous still-life tradition.

Indeed, the art historical references found in Currin’s show and in that of De Bruyckere’s are too numerous to mention. Paradoxically, these heavy allusions and detail-oriented mastery techniques introduce something fresh into the image and the reading of the image by a culture (art and otherwise) that for facility of production, brevity of message or poignancy of impact tends to assert a representation isolated in modernity. ❚

Berlinde De Bruyckere / John Currin was exhibited at the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal, from June 30 to November 13, 2011. _ Tracy Valcourt lives and writes in Montreal._