Doron Langberg

Danese Corey Gallery - New York

By Julie Heffernan

Doron Langberg’s recent work at Danese Corey Gallery brought to mind the words “hot mess,” but in the best of senses, describing something in attractive disarray, steeped in fluids and emanations, gushing forth. But what Langberg also messes with is us and our expectations about visual and conceptual hierarchies: figure versus ground, warm versus cold, power versus suppliance. His figures evaporate while his grounds body forth. His colors defy the laws of temperature with warm reds receding and cool blues advancing. And his characters inhabit powerful positions of determined dissolution.

All of Langberg’s figures evanesce in one way or another, but they are at the same time vividly present. They inhabit nether states-of sleep or shadow or of the very ground of the painting itself, the product of some kind of magisterial wipe of the rag and rub of the sandpaper that leaves them barely there anymore. But there’s a haptic quality to Langberg’s thick applications of paint that congeal around his characters in a kind of amplified negative space gone virulently figural. In its baring of surfaces, paint functions now as a bearer of secrets. So, with the figure itself now the stuff of ground-a mere background wash-and the negative space around it now the thickest stuff of figural mud, what are we to make of the very idea of a hierarchical figure since Langberg has so utterly othered it?

Doron Lanberg, Tom, 2014, oil on linen, 50” x 60.” Courtesy of the artist.

Artists continue to find inventive ways to demote the figure: Cecily Brown and Marlene Dumas dissolve it; Fischl and Currin distend it; Yuskavage and Saville bloat it. Langberg, however, is doing something restorative for the figure: His characters seem to exist for us in the service of intimacy and secrets. In the spirit of Bonnard, Langberg has hidden his figures in order to better represent the mysterious nature of a hidden self. He has concealed the figure now in a mess of paint and color, only to reveal it anew in all its illicit and animal glamour.

We learn something of the nature of in-between-ness in these paintings-states of semi-consciousness and post-coital bliss. The figure in Sleep, his head and lower legs steeped in sepia while his torso is transparent cerulean, seems to be literally between life and the beyond, as though his active mind, flushed roseate in vivid dream state, were in league with his ruddy legs to carry him somewhere that his bluish torso, with all its gastric and pulmonary preoccupations rendered coolly inactive by sleep, just couldn’t go. It is as though sleep were a medium itself: the very air around the figure rendered slippery, catching the body up in its aqueous grasp.

Langberg also revels in the stickiness of the air around us, subsuming his characters in stuff. Tom is a seated figure, the product of adamant erasure, enveloped by an atmosphere of goo. Tom’s features are barely sketched in, and his flesh has been violently abraded away by a belt sander. Here Langberg has replaced the usual authority of the figure with a vividness of habitat. Shovelfuls of yellow ochre paint, like putrid cow patties situated on the wall behind him, create a space for Tom that functions more like a mudslide threatening to engulf, rather than a wall. But it is a glorious profusion of sick paint, a feast of petroleum product that is more the stuff of glamour than of spatial location-muchness, too muchness, to the point of ecstasy.

By decentering the figure, Langberg allows us to have our nude and dethrone it too. These are closeted figures that slip our grasp and gnaw away at normativities, whispering for something else. They are crepuscular, sub-umbral figures that mostly don’t belong to the daylight. And when they do, as in Gaby, Julia and Amy, they somehow look too awake, like characters wandered onto the wrong set in a Langbergian noir drama. Within that nether state he understands so well, Langberg’s figures glow like luna moths, flickering towards the light.

(November 20 - December 23, 2015)

Julie Heffernan is an artist and a professor of fine arts at Montclair State University and represented by PPOW Gallery in New York, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, Cal. Heffernan is also a board member of the National Academy Museum.

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