Tom Lovatt

Something about the naked brutality of boxing seems to demand aesthetics. Writers, painters and filmmakers have always been drawn to the sweet science, lured by the notion that violence can be contained and controlled through form.

Winnipeg painter Tom Lovatt isn’t a big fight fan. He happened to be at his local gym when a bout of mixed martial arts—boxing’s even more thuggish cousin—appeared on the large-screen TV. Watching two men beat the hell out of each other and then finish with a surprisingly courtly embrace, Lovatt became fascinated with this stylized spectacle of masculine aggression. “Fight,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings that showed at Winnipeg’s Gurevich Fine Art, explores the tension between brutality and beauty, violence and vulnerability. Lovatt takes apart action shots of fighters and then puts them back together so that the images are recognizable but slightly transformed. In the process, the artist attempts to work out his complicated feelings about fighting and its contested place in contemporary culture.

Lovatt’s work frequently mines art history, in particular images from 17th-century Spanish and Flemish painting. “Fight” might seem like a departure, but there are echoes here of the classical warriors and wrestlers of Greece and Rome, as well as the early 20th-century boxing paintings of George Bellows, who turned straining muscles into painterly blurs. Almost half the show is taken up by small Conté on paper drawings. With multiple overlapping versions of anatomy and complex, twisting poses, they resemble academic figure studies. Some function as preparatory drawings for larger paintings, but they work beautifully as stand-alone pieces, possessing a kind of pared-down tension.

Lovatt’s other source is the mass media. His lines might be classical, but his colours, in works like Do or Die and Seeing Red, suggest the glare of photography, with raw, meaty pinks, ghostly greens and strident yellows. The slippery sheen of his surfaces seems to reference TV screens and shiny magazine pages. In Punch and All Punch, we see cheeks crumpling and distorted under the weight of a blow, sweat and water flying off as the fist makes contact. These are representations of boxing made possible by photography and film, including iconic shots of Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano and those famous slow-motion sequences in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. But while Lovatt starts with photo-based images, he always works them over in an appropriately pugilistic way with paint. Like British artist Malcolm Morley’s photorealist paintings of horseracing, these pieces explore the intersections between painting and photography, as well as the visual paradox of suspended motion.

Thematically, Lovatt walks a contested line, investigating the clandestine romance between straight-up macho violence and sneaky homoerotic subtext. The subject of Fighting Fit, a deliciously small oil painting, is what sportscasters like to call “a good-looking fighter,” a bloodied Valentino with a swollen black eye and a gashed forehead. With his modest downcast glance, he embodies a kind of gorgeous, wounded male beauty. Title Match depicts two boxers in a dance of advance and resistance, coming together and pulling apart in what feels like a cross between a pas de deux and a bar brawl. And in Tap Out, which represents a climactic moment in a Mixed Martial Arts match, the homoerotic pull seems even more pronounced. The men’s legs are intertwined on the mat, body looming over body in a ritualized show of dominance and submission.

Lovatt is also concerned with issues of spectatorship. Several works point to the presence of cameras, their old-style magnesium flashbulbs forming luminous white aureoles. Seeing Red foregrounds the dramatic arena lights, emphasizing the fight’s stageyness while the referee, with his incongruous bowtie formality, seems to wait in the wings. In the bottom of the image, faces lurk at the foot of the ring, passive and mute observers of a fighter whose face streams with blood. In Vicious Left, a slightly obscured onlooker could almost be a guarded portrait of Lovatt himself.

Most of the works offer this disconcertingly closed circle of bully, victim and bystander. And of course, looking at them, we become bystanders ourselves. We might claim neutrality, but we’re implicated. The Conté pieces draw us in with their exquisite delineations of the idea of fighting. In these works violence still seems like a technical exercise—a mathematical matter of force and angle, an aesthetic issue of poses and historical precedents. The paintings, with their lurid lighting and queasy colours, confront us with something much more visceral, a knockout punch of violence passed off as entertainment.

Boxing is the one sport in which physical suffering is not just a possible outcome of the contest but is actually built into it. “Fight” forces us to reckon with that. ❚

“Tom Lovatt: Fight” was exhibited at Gurevich Fine Art, Winnipeg, from April 5 to April 27, 2013.

Alison Gillmor is the pop culture columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and writes regularly on visual arts and film.