Artists & Works |
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| Arnold Mesches American (b.1924) ART IN PUBLIC PLACES I (1983) acrylic on canvas 80" x 98" |
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| ©Arnold Mesches |
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Art in Public Places, I represents a characteristic technique
for Arnold Mesches—juxtaposing an image from art history with
an image of contemporary or historical reality. The figures hanging
in the foreground are inspired by a famous photograph of Benito
Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci. The painting that Mesches
refers to in the background is Delacroix' Liberty Leading the
People (although this background is deliberately blurred and
indistinct). Both of these images have political meaning, one from
the era of the French Revolution, one from World War II. |
CRITICAL EXCERPTS |
| Eleanor Heartney, ARTnews, 1/92 "Traditional history painting transforms isolated events, objects, and individuals into symbols of national purpose or greatness. The works in this show shatter the illusory unity of this genre, adapting its stylistic clichés to convey instead the sense of a world gone awry...The title of this series is 'Anomie,' defined in the accompanying catalogue as 'the lack of ethical values, the absence of moral values in a society'... ultimately they reveal a haunting emptiness. The focus of each painting is suggested by the date in its title...Mesches skillfully exposes the ugly underside of historical myth. Heroes and exalted purposes are revealed to be comforting illusions. What emerges instead is a damning critique of the 20th century as a time when killing machines overshadowed mankind's better impulses." Richard Huntington, Buffalo News, 10/4/85 "Mesches is an artist in his 60s who paints like he's 18 and in the heat of discovering paints' uncanny ability to unlock the holy and unholy messages...In one of these canvasses, Delacroix's painting is the foil to two rather contemporary people who are being dangerously suspended by their heels. The picture just manages to hold together spatially and the resulting formal tension is just what is needed to galvanize the ideas of the old art and new images...Mesches, in his balancing of social and painterly interests provided, to use the artist's words, 'an edge to walk on.'" |
| Donald Kuspit, Arnold Mesches: Imagining the Unimaginable, catalogue essay, Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University/Burchfield-Penney Art Center 5/88 "The uncanny is fraught with contradiction—with the pressure of ambivalence. In Mesches' pictures ambivalence is direct, outspoken, immediate, the very substance of the picture, apparent with a stern irreducibility that seems like a last judgement...a precarious balancing act of dense figural/objective substance and luridly empty space...The first—most primordial—level of surface in a Mesches picture is, paradoxically, not literally a material surface, although it appears as one: it is emptiness...Sometimes the emptiness is materialized as—masked by?—an imagist palimpsest, a zone of illusory memory, as in the works quoting various modernist masterpieces (or Old master works that seem especially relevant to modern experience). These masterworks form an imaginative backdrop to the "real" figures and events depicted front and center by Mesches...Mesches presents these great masterpieces as ghosts of themselves—as abandoned shadows...By articulating them as almost inchoate "auras," Mesches suggests that their "greatness" has as much to do with their evocative power—their hold on our fantasy life—as with the character of their construction...Manet's painting is as soiled with time—as dead—as the row of chickens, but the generic fantasy—the act of imagining the unimaginable, that which one will not admit to oneself—still remains...These realistic figures and objects in Mesches' cast—and his works are clearly high theater—seem unaware of the presence of this profound, if shipwrecked, artistic past...T.W. Adorno: "If works of art are to survive in the context of extremity and darkness, which is social reality, and if they're are to avoid being sold as mere comfort, they have to assimilate themselves to that reality. Radical art today is the same as dark art: its background colour is black..." His quotations of modern Old masters in particular function as so many screams: to Mesches, to quote can only be to scream...In Art in Public Places 1, 1983, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People forms the backdrop for the dead figures, grimly hanging by their heels...The Delacroix changes meaning: it implies that the struggle for liberty continues: that we are poised at the revolutionary moment, whose outcome is unclear. Is Mesches showing us a moment of arrested historical development?...(In general, Mesches makes elegant use of the inherent conflict between the primary colors.) New tyrants may arise, indeed, are likely to: is that the hidden meaning of the obvious meaning of the figures?...There is an irony to the scene, confirmed not only by the color contrasts but by the rightsideupness of the figures in the Delacroix...Mesches violent juxtaposition of art and life, suggesting their irreconcilability, suggests that art is a promise of happiness that will never exist in life...The painting tells the ironic, pessimistic truth; the apparently optimistic political photograph is misleading. Art tells the deepest truth about reality, not its photographic reproduction....the sense of blind determination—fatalism—that pervaded Mesches' pictures is a sign of instinctive death wish...Mesches confronts us with well bred visions of death, that come straight at us." |