Staged Beauty | The Paintings of Marc Dennis “In images…beauty
was the agency that caused pleasure in the beholder; and any theory
of images that was not grounded
in the pleasure
of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself
to inconsequence.”
Marc Dennis’s emergence and development as an artist run seemingly parallel to these broader shifts in criticism in the 1990s. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a master’s degree in painting in the early 90s, introducing a body of beautifully accomplished work that may have appeared at first glance stylistically conservative in its deliberate use of pre-modernist representation modes. It was also around that time that I first noticed Marc’s paintings in a solo exhibition at Martin-Rathburn Gallery in San Antonio, Texas. Struck by its technical virtuosity and sheer beauty I made a mental note of this young painter’s work. Subsequently, it was Marc’s paintings that initiated my interest in a group of artists who worked in a similar vein, appropriating Old Master painting technique yet adding the complexity of our times as their context and subject. Resulting in “Memory of Pleasure,” the exhibition included approximately 60 works by Marc and other artists including Julie Heffernan and Brenda Zlamany. Savoring the visual pleasures of seductive color, sensuous line, and voluptuous surface, these artists unabashedly explored the subversive potential of beauty and pleasure, demonstrating their increasing disenchantment with the didacticism of much politically concerned art of the previous decade. They put into practice what Hickey suggested when he argued that, “if they [images] only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren’t doing them, we are.” By putting an emphasis on the fusion of subject and object, viewer and art, Marc and the other painters chose to propose an art that persuades rather than preaches, claiming beauty as an ally between the image and its beholder. In their decidedly postmodern paintings, Marc and company seduced the viewer to look closely by using such familiar and inviting genres like still life, landscape, and portraiture to ensnare the viewer who subsequently could not resist the rich layers of emerging meaning. While the paintings may have evoked nostalgia for familiar historical styles, the subjects – fragmented and floating in a sea of representations – were very much of the moment. Marc’s self-conscious adoption of pre-modernist styles had therefore little to do with simple mannerisms or longing for a seemingly more innocent past but rather served as a means to express a variety of conceptual approaches to a longstanding tradition of craftsmanship in painting. “To an artist a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of “pushing paint,” breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing,” art historian James Elkins noted in his book, What Painting Is. Marc’s entire body of work is characterized by this kind of immersion in the physicality of painting. In a series from the mid-90s – including The Mismeasure of Man and The Good and Evil Twin – masterful technique and subject matter come together to create images of sensuous mystery. Featuring beautifully articulated curtains in various states of aperture, partially obscuring richly symbolic emblems like tulips and monkeys, these intimate paintings not only reference the theatricality of the Baroque but also the performative nature of painting. To emphasize the theatrical aspect of painting, Marc often used the image of the monkey during this period. In his recent work, Marc uses other tropes to illustrate this. Prior to the Renaissance, painting and sculpture were dismissed as imperfect imitations of reality, expressed in the metaphor, “Ars simia naturae,” or “art is the ape of nature.” Sparked by a simultaneous repulsion and fascination with our simian next of kin, the monkey has stood in for all kinds of human foibles throughout the history of art. Marc’s monkeys, however, seemed to possess a spirit of character and awareness, which is unusual in the portrayal of animals. Likewise, his dogs, rabbits, and horses – an integral part of his work since the beginning – as well as his imaginary animal/human hybrids seem to challenge age-old dichotomies between human and animal nature. A large painting from that period, for instance, combined classical mythology and Biblical narrative, representing a transgression of boundaries in similar ways. While the glow in Marc’s paintings is reminiscent of the theatricality of Old Master paintings, his iconography and style are not all drawn on seventeenth-century Baroque masters like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Velázquez. They also include more popular traditions like tattoo, Mexican retablos, and the carnivalesque. Paintings like The Spanish Virgin, Allegory of a Racist, and Ghetto Lady – all from the mid-90s – attest to Marc’s broad interests that not only include art history, the natural world, animal behavior, and psychology but also the margins of culture and history. Another series of paintings from that same period, which is of particular relevance to the current work, consisted of truncated arms floating against dark backgrounds. The arms are pierced with arrows, paired with frogs and fish, or covered in snails and tattoos. In their treatment of part versus whole these images echo Marc’s recent series of intimate oil-on-wood self-portraits – Self-Portrait with Hamster, Self-Portrait with Turtle – in which isolated life-size hands hold an assortment of small vulnerable pet animals. Illuminated from a single light source outside the fame, these arms and hands seem to be speaking in a peculiar sign language of intimidating strength and tender curiosity with veins bulging and muscles tensing under the exquisitely painted skin. Legend has it that Jan van Eyck invented oil paint to more accurately render the texture of human flesh. Painting is like a layer of skin, a fragile wall between the interior and the exterior, in which the canvas becomes a metaphor for the body. It is not surprising then that Marc has compared the additive and subtractive process of painting to plastic surgery. In one painting from the series of detached arms Marc returns this correlation between paint and skin to a symbiotic relationship. Tattoos, snails, arrows and other imagistic enigmas allow Marc to adumbrate a contemporary symbolism that relates to the act of painting. “Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tens,” Elkins notes, about the dialogue that takes place between painter and paint, and adds, “Paint is a cast made of the painter’s movements, and portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts.” In a recent statement about his work, Marc wrote: “No matter what I choose to paint, t is always more the paint and the act of painting.” While attention to the materials and processes of painting has been central to Marc’s entire oeuvre it has become even more palpable in the lusciously modeled blues and greens of his recent seascapes and the richly nuanced fur of his larger-than-life puppies from the last few years. “As any artist knows,” to quote Elkins, “there is no such thing as effortless mimesis: it takes work to make paint look like anything at all.” It is Marc’s virtuoso technical facility that seduces us into believing that we are looking at the sea itself in his seascapes of various sizes, ostensibly supporting the painting-as-window tradition. Representational painting has tended to be trapped within an economy of signs, for its obvious relation to visible reality, that is also characteristic of our thinking about photography. Pointing to our presumption of veracity in photographs, Roland Barthes argues in his poetic treatise on photography, Camera Lucida, that a photograph could never be distinguished from what it represents. He noted that, “The photograph belong to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape, Good and Evil, desire and its object.” These pairs in a mutually supporting embrace are also inseparable in Marc’s work. What we notice first in Marc’s pictures of the sea, as if looking out a window, is his careful rendition of the water itself: the white capped waves, the swirling foam, the play of shadow and light across its surface, and the mist over the breaking waves. Only through a more sustained viewing of the small paintings do we realize that something ominous has just taken place or is about to take place. Machine gunfire, we learn, is the cause of a line of shooting water in one scene, while a rising submarine is just below the swelling water in another. The beauty of the reflected light on the agitated sea in Seascape with Place Crash draws us in to look closer. As we fully grasp its ramifications we tremble with a sense of embarrassment at our experience of beauty in the face of a terrible tragedy. According to eighteenth-century English philosopher Edmund Burke it is, however, exactly this sensation of gear and awe that constitutes the sublime. Maintaining that fear pays an important role in our sensation of sublimity, Burke argued that we are moved most greatly by what is “dark, uncertain, confused.” Burke’s romanticism is further expressed by his ideas of the boundless infinite, which finds such sublime expression in Marc’s large seascapes and explosions. Lest we get too caught up in the turbulently swirling and eddying water of Birth of Venus or the violently blazing ball of fire of The Annunciation, Marc returns us to our own physical presence within the space of the gallery by highlighting the boundaries of these seemingly limitless scenes. As we move on to a painting like Nature Special we suddenly become aware of its staged quality, which is emphasized by the theater light floating from the top edge of the painting, reminiscent of a microphone that by mistake popped into the frame of the movie. Suddenly our suspension of disbelief is interrupted and we realize that we are looking not at nature but at a mediated version of it. That we are looking at mediated nature is further emphasized by the square format of the small seascapes – a format that has almost devotional connotations within the history of art. While being the perfect vehicle to demonstrate his mastery of the medium, Marc’s elegantly rendered horses and delightfully detailed puppies on monochromatic backgrounds similarly point to the constructedness of the picture in his insistence on the almost sentimental artifice of the image. Marc’s version of The Last Supper further emphasizes our sense about the theatricality of painting, asking us to fill in the blanks of this iconic image. Just as Venus is left to our imagination in his Birth of Venus, the artist asks us here to make up our own list of dinner guests, as we believe we can make out the gagger’s call to action in the distance. Andrea Inselmann |