ART CITIES: London-Rober Longo

While Robert Longo has worked in a variety of media, he is best known for his large-scale, hyper-realistic charcoal drawings that reflect on the construction of symbols of power and authority. Inspired by Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, he explores the effects of living in an image-saturated culture – how we filter, retain and process the images that bombard us daily.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace & Thaddaeus Ropac Galleries

The narrative strength and emotive impact of Rober Longo’s works come from the transformation of the intimate practice of drawing into the monumental scale of painting, as well as the meticulous detail he achieves in charcoal. Rober Longo presents his solo exhibition “Searchers” at two galleries in London. Each presentation includes a new “Combine” (monumental, five-panel multimedia wall works that return to the artist’s 1981-89 series of the same name_ in addition to a large-scale charcoal drawing, a small graphite drawing, and a film. By rupturing and reassembling the symbols of a collective cultural mythology, these works advance Longo’s long-standing investigation into the relationship between the individual to society. Informed by Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage and John Berger’s influential text “Ways of Seeing” (1972), “Searchers” grew out of Longo’s desire for his charcoal drawings to be and do more. For the exhibitions he has revisited his “Combines”, which he envisions as a tool in which to overcome the visual and conceptual limitations of two-dimensional images. Referring to Robert Rauschenberg’s earlier series of the same name, these large-scale, three-dimensional works bring together a range of materials (such as paint, stone, plaster, cast bronze, glass) and media (such as sculpture, drawing, film, photography) in a single work. The disparate parts are arranged in the way that Longo believes we encounter the world: as a bombardment of images and information that pervade our environment and consciousness.

At Pace the five-panel work “Untitled (Hunter)” (2024), is composed of the following, from left to right: a film still of Keanu Reeves from the movie “John Wick””, a hyper-violent film about vengeance; a cascading sculptural relief made up of dense vertical strips of black and red plexiglass with dangerous, irregular, and highly reflective edges; a painting using 3D printing of cut-and-pasted protest images; a video of a sparkling blue-black current installed behind a steel frame with seven horizontal openings receding in perspective; and a charcoal drawing based on a grainy telephoto image of refugees at the Belarus-Polish border, appearing like a ring from Dante’s Inferno. Internally, Longo’s “Combines” resist simple resolution. Each constituent image of “Untitled (Hunter)” captures a moment of acute, visually violent motion. Their formal symbolism, suspended like a staccato edit in a film, undergoes a further stage of translation as they are entwined with their respective mediums. By applying scale and sequential structure to these familiar yet incompatible images, Longo challenges the viewer to interpret the work and, by extension, the expansive array of images that surround us. In this endeavor, Longo echoes Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s theory that ‘the medium is the message,’ highlighting how these images are mediated shapes our understanding and response to them. Accompanying the Combine at Pace is “Untitled (Black Peony)” (2024), a large-scale charcoal drawing. Longo describes flowers as “at once feminine yet masculine; sweet yet venomous; explosive yet temporal events.” Another drawing, “Untitled (After Navalny)” (2024), based on a photograph of a protest following the unlawful imprisonment and subsequent death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is also included in the exhibition, this work once again transforms scale to challenge the viewer’s process of meaning-making. The final element of the exhibition is a black-and-white, ultra-fast-paced, looped film presenting the onslaught of the image storm from one day of international news: July 4, 2024. The rapid flood of images is interrupted randomly by computer-generated stops, creating an experience with no beginning and no end, only different ways of looking and seeing.

At Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery “(Untitled) Pilgrim” (2024) resists singular interpretation through the juxtaposition of images, materials and media drawn together across its five panels. A charcoal drawing of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture the “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa” (1647-52) is cropped tightly to the mystic’s face, highlighting her enigmatic expression of exquisite pain and ecstasy. Longo explains that such ambiguity of expression recalls the contorted poses of the suited figures of his “Men in the Cities”, captured either dancing or dying. Finding parallels between the processes of drawing and sculpting, Longo ‘carves out the image’ of Saint Teresa upon the paper as he translates it across mediums, comparing the saint’s ecstasy to his experience of artmaking. Next to Saint Teresa, a video of fire is set behind a frame of steel bars, imprisoning the symbol of passion. Conceived as an homage to a steel work by multidisciplinary American artist Gretchen Bender, which revealed a video through a small slit, Longo cultivates the dual status of fire as both beautiful and destructive, as well as its alchemical potential to ‘transform matter from one kind to another.’ In turn, a panel of densely tangled, horizontal bronze tree branches, cast from branches taken from the artist’s own garden, is reminiscent of the stylistic mode of Abstract Expressionism. This is followed by a photographic image of an iceberg taken from the internet, which acts as a counterpoint to the video of fire, marking a temperature shift from hot to cold. A stripe down the centre of the image marks a former waterline, rendered visible when the iceberg turned in the water. Evoking Longo’s drawings of icebergs, which recur as a key motif in his artmaking, the photograph asserts his conviction in the power of images as consciousness-raising tools, here, highlighting the devastating effects of climate change. At the centre of “Untitled (Pilgrim)”, Longo presents an image of an opulent diamond necklace lifted from a Chanel advertisement that he encountered on the wrapper of an issue of The New York Times. Struck by the proximity of the mechanisms of capitalist desire to the contemporary consumption of news, the artist was compelled to use the image in his own work. Printing it on enamelled aluminium, “so it would feel like a painting”, he materialises the alluring quality of the advert within the Combine. Conceiving “Pilgrim” and “Hunter” as “reclining figures”, he describes the necklace of the former as “the arms that hold the piece together”. “Untitled (Pilgrim)” is accompanied by a large-scale charcoal drawing of wisteria.’ The exhibition also includes a small graphite drawing, which depicts a 2022 protest sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman who died in Iranian police custody. The final element of the exhibition is a black-and-white, ultra-fast-paced, looped film presenting the onslaught of the ‘image storm’ of a single day of international news: 4 July 2024. The film is presented on two scales across the galleries – as big as the space allows at Pace and as small as visually comprehensive at Thaddaeus Ropac. The rapid flood of images will be interrupted randomly by computer-generated stops. There is no beginning and no end, only different ways of looking and seeing.

Photo: Robert Longo, Untitled (Pilgrim), 2024. Mixed Media, 5 parts. © Robert Longo, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Seoul ©. Photo: Eva Herzog.

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Ely House, London, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 8/10-20/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/ & Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 9/10-9/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/