Lara de los Reyes
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
4 February - 2 March 2009
Usually one drinks after a tragedy has struck them but drinking far too many rends one into a comic spectacle - clumsily fumbling and shuffling out of the bar, scraping knees and elbows against door jambs and table edges, slurring pronouncements of inchoate sentient genius, saliva dribbling freely down the chin forming florid maps of whisky and cabernet sauvignon staining a once pristine white shirt. The hangover the morning after heaves out the drunk in tragic cycle once again.
Nietzsche proposes that tragedy's foundation is in its 'untergang'; intoxication perhaps is one of this means to 'go under' before reaching the fine equilibrium of Dionysian and Apollonian apogee. Thus the inebriated swagger is the pivotal push-and-pull to either one.
This may be true of the tondo portraits of the anonymous smashed featured in Lara Delos Reyes' exhibit The Heart is A Lonely Hunter opening at Mag:net on 4 February. These are portraits that more than portray the allegory of Poe's The Oval Portrait, of a long process of a consuming wasting away and falling into a pit of temporal unconsciousness which the very shape endows it with a preciousness of a sardonic memento mori. The artist moreover, tries to recreate this endless nauseating sway associated with passing out, or as Barthes would put it as "the spinning out of a pleasure", with the hunched over and lying subjects seen as though through portholes. The culprit to this folly is clued in further by a pair of alabaster ceramic molds of beer cans.
This is not so much an obsessive predilection for the grit nor of the mere and near poignant portrayal of exuberant excess and fallen reason. The drama is rather stripped away in the high-contrast flash of a commonplace snapshot, no mystique surrounding them as possessed of Van Gogh's absinthe drinkers. They are as were pictured at the moment of stilled numbness with heads veiled but bent in unconditional surrender.
Painting these subjects is, however a refined attempt at a conjunctional but a quite contradicting symbiosis between banal impulses and exultant pleasure, between objective and subjective reflexivity, which could merit a degree of "profane illumination".
Hence, if drinking can have its virtue in its pleasure, in emboldening one's surrender to one's earthly humanity; then painting or art general can have its vice in suspending such surrender as a picture of aberrant martyrdom and valor.
Tragedy indeed thrives on the comedy, or rather the otherwise is truer. "termed by either W.Burroughs or W. Benjamin on that which "recognizes mysteriousness of the everyday, the everydayness of the mystery"
Mag:net Gallery is located at 335 Agcor Building,
No comments:
Post a Comment