Buenos Aires Herald

ART IN CLASSICAL MODE

By Didier Maleuvre
For the Herald

 

Once upon a time titans walked the earth, elves and naiads played in enchanted forests where centaurs grazed and battled, swans ravished maidens, and jealous deities visited terrible punishment upon those mortals who, for intemperance or pride, transgressed beyond their human bonds: indeed the sort of stuff you may see in some Titians or Veroneses or Berninis: fauns, satyrs and naked matrons intermingling limbs, grappling at grapes and tossing up the ambrosia as though Christian guilt was still only a disgruntled rumor going round Rome’s low-life districts. Traditional painting and sculpture always welcomed these scenes and stories: they provided the pathos and heroicness that made for great plastic displays of colors, gestures, and forms.

Our age, as we know, is far more rationalistic. We subscribe to more muted tones, distrust the heroic mode, scoff at the grandiose, and have explained away myths and demi-gods. Enough of transcendence. Away with magic. Down with mythology. Modern art prefers the human and the everyday, the abstract and the intellectual but rarely the outrageously sensuous and mannerist. But the good thing about modern art is that it also pretty much lets you do what you please—including, being deliberately and unfashionably un-modern.

Gabriel Grün and Lorena Guzmán are deliberately and unfashionably un-modern. The former paints like the seventeenth century has only just begun and the latter achieves the sculptural delicateness of Victorian statuary. Both favor mythological subjects, characters half man and half goat, wreathed in flowers, mutating into trees, or copulating with swans. Their works are shot through with classical references lifted from the masters of European art: the purpose, however, seems not to do pastiche, to quote slyly or cleverly, to boast savoir-faire or to toy around with the classics. Nor is their works slavishly imitative. The astounding thing about Gabriel Grün in particular, the wonder and authority of his paintings, is that he really does paint as though he were a contemporary of Dürer, Grunwald or el Greco and, one may add, not a lesser contemporary at that. For Grün paints confoundedly well. I found myself absorbed by his background landscapes, his lacquer-black and fir-green valleys slashed through by the red of a volcanic sunset, the silver lace of a river, the brown crags of distant mountains, the same way Bruegel’s or Van Eyck’s horizons take you in. Grün’s landscapes have the power of absorption of a time spellbound by the far-away dreamlike horizon—the era before airplanes and telecommunications demystified distances. His foreground scenes are no less striking. His Saint Sebastian and his Pan stand before you with all the sinewy strength, the vivid carnality, the sensuous undulation of masterworks, of, say, Michelangelo’s “The Dying Slave”. But Grün of course is a modern. So where El Greco’s or Mantegna’s martyrs show the longing spasm of religious rapture, Grün frankly acknowledges the masochistic frisson. Here, perhaps, is the reason why the painter chooses himself as model for the saint, for his Pan, or for his Cillaro, the centaur fatally struck by an arrow. Grün evidently delights in submitting his body to the languid expressiveness of pain which classical artists habitually found in painting the Stations of the Cross. You will want to know that the arrows on his Sebastian are actual real-life arrows shot by painter with a bow at his own painting. At first the very idea gives you a squirm of esthetic faintness: how can the maker himself dare assault his own creation, so beautiful and magisterial? How did he know the arrows would dig themselves into just the right places? What if he had marred the whole by unsightly misplaced holes? What depths of sadistic self-aggression does this gesture reveal? And yet: is this not a way for the painter to suffer, in the very flesh of his creation, the danger and pain of his Sebastian? This is art with the courage of risk, art with guts, art with a heart.

How fresh, how heartening to find a contemporary artist who paints nudes but avoids the trite boring obviousness of sex or artsy-fartsy porn. He reminds you that nudity is also tremulous presence, not just voyeuristic flash. You feel the shudder of veins beneath the skin, you suffer the twitch and shiver of those muscles, the gentle fold of a breathing abdomen and you know there is a heart and a life and a soul inside that body. It is a long time since I have seen so moving a scene as his “Cillaro e Hilonoma”, the two lover centaurs who, mortally wounded, exchange a last delicate touch, he already in death as though in the tenderness of sleep, she with Botticelli hair—and between them, the searching aching loveliness of their touching fingers, a gesture and a detail that alone deserves anthology: think God’s and Adam’s digits on the Sixtine Chapel ceiling, only painted by Dürer. Or rather by Grün. This is quite simply art touching a height.

His painting of Leda and the Swan, on the other hand, is markedly kinkier. It makes a nice bridge over to Lorena Guzmán’s own sculpture of the bird-ravished maiden standing nearby. Guzmán too favors mythological subjects, Leda, Diana, Medea, Narcissus, but her treatment is more provocative. Her models are all children, and of course the viewer may not be ready for a girl-child toying around with a long-necked swan near her delicate labia, a school-age Diana humping a dog or a Narcissus boy with a vigorous erection. The closest thing to that we had before was Pinocchio. Is this only provocation? Not so. First because her sculptures are too preciously done to suppose they are only scandal-mongering (see the aching suppleness of Leda’s neck and back and you think of a Degas ballerina); and second because Guzmán is right to associate myths with the impulsive, tantrum instinctiveness of childhood: a time of unfuzzy frankness about sexual organs, cuddling proximity with animals, bogeymen and dreams.

Given their young age (together Grün and Guzmán’s ages barely top fifty), these two artists are proof that conceptual and technical mastery does not necessarily wait for maturity. It is impossible to imagine that they are not destined to yet greater things—we are clearly at the start of something great. Until then, their show is a delight not to be missed.

Art in a classical mode