Primary Scenes

Quoting reality in order to establish an experiential ground on which to build viewers' empathy and, through a narrative that is first and foremost a discourse of Art: of symbolic information enhancing emotion and secondarily the telling of a fabulous story, was a fundamental strategy of early Renaissance painting. It was, then, partly the physical response of pictorial artmaking to the decline of the metaphysical as a focus of the intellectual explanation of the world, partly the self-affirmation of a new Society investing itself with quasi-religious significance. This existential turn of the visual inventions found a specific voice in perspective, in the figural repositioning of man and woman as functions of a purely human space. Perspective's language made possible, at the beginning of the mechanical age, the seamless inscription of the historica1 present into the unhistorical past, a past predicated on myths whose foundational role was (still is) politically required by religious assumptions. (Interestingly enough, this grafting of contemporaneity onto myths of the Beginning was usually exercised in the representation of Christian stories/legends relevant to the metahistory of European cities, much more rarely in the depiction of Biblical and Pagan events, or invents, lifted from classical texts.) The pursuit of flatness in the first decades of the Twentieth century, from Malevich and Mondrian to Newman and Marden, as a means for the presentation of a purely interiorized sublime, and then the erasure of pictorial space altogether by Conceptual art, brought to a closure the constantly moving target, over five centuries, of transcribing the social and/or the spiritual into mythographic icons structured by the orderly (or disorderly) conduit of a geometric perspective. And it has been only with the transfer onto the canvas, without any mediations of history, of the ready-made space of photography that social narratives have innovatively re-entered the field of painting. This implies that the artist now has to reach the depth (rather than the death) of an archetype through photoconstructed images, making the found, yet intentional, representation of the material/visible world overlap and coincide with the metaphorical, mental, invisible, or ideological constructs produced in the subconscious.

Since photography doesn't convey geometric relationships, and inscribes reality as a sequence of forms, spaces, volumes and colors unshaped by sentimentality and subjectivism (that may inevitably mark the fabrication of a Scene), the photo-constructed image when translated into painting plays as much intentionally as possible a game of hide-and-seek with conceptuality and materiality, with abstraction and figuration, with virtuality and factuality, with literality and metaphor. In the case of Damian Loeb's work, nothing gets lost and everything is gained in the translation from the photograph to the picture on canvas, and by everything I mean the art of painting and the painting of art. Through its digital manipulation in photoshop (artists' new high tech laboratory), Loeb's selected snapshot undergoes a process of reduction and enhancing, both in its iconicity and in its chromatic subtlety/intensity, that assigns it the role once exerted by a sketch or a preparatory drawing. The working photograph thus obtained (a kind of digitally produced sinopia) functions as a visual guide to its re-productlon on the canvas, where its spatial and color relations are maintained, but where the painter also performs the old magical act of giving body to an idea. The glazing finally undergone by the painted picture translates the photograph's glossiness into a sharp light that maximizes the painterliness of every inch of brushwork, while sealing the image in its own unreachable phantasm. The baroque hypergloss that gives an almost metallic shining to his canvases was already marking Loeb's early work, where the quasi-fantastic narratives resulted from the collaging of photographic illustrations lifted from disparate sources and amalgamated into an hyperreal fiction. This signature interest in constructing hypernarratives presented in a photographic mode but alluding rather pointedly to a cinematic event (the titles of Loeb's pictures are significantly mostly derived from movies) has shaped his subsequent work, based on the digital rearrangement of different frames from the same movie in a new single image, a newly-invented auratic scene generating its own primary meaning, posited in memory. (In an interview with Adrian Dannatt published in the June 2003 issue of "The Art Newspaper", the artist described his digital/pictorial lab/oratorium as: "First, a Sony DLP projector. Then, a very fast Macintosh, several illicit software programmes for deciphering digital video code, and Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. Then, Old Holland oil paints and Isabey Kolinsky sable and badger brushes on a thick Belgian linen which has been sized with rabbit skin glue and lead primed.")

Loeb's most recent work, Metropolitan (2004, oil on linen, 48x96 inches), trans-poses the fleeting moment of a cocktail party event, cannily captured by his assisted camera, into a self-made pageant of style and heightened sociality, a modern sacra conversazione, a mystery play of bodies, dresses and wine glasses packed in one frozen image from a sequence of urban life. Having, at least temporarily, set aside the dissecting and collaging of the found imagery of films, the artist creates his own cinematic scenes, photographing daily situations in cities that may have been backdrops in movies. In order to achieve, however, a ready-made filmic look in his pictures, he has incised on the lens of his professional SLR camera (a Canon 1DS) two parallel black lines that instantly configure in a wide screen format his snapshots. This cinemascoping of reality translates into canvases of four by eight feet, that is with a 1 to 2 ratio, midway between the 1.85:1 and 2.35:1 aspect ratio of most DVD. Metropolitan (the title references the 1990 Whit Stillman's film), presents a waist view of a circle of guests at a party in a clothing store. Five figures, cropped at the neck and knee, crowd a space where fashionable dresses, a full rack of them actually, are hanging at the far left of the picture, faintly distinguishable since the lens had mostly in focus the four people (two women and two men) at the center and right of the scene. A girl at left, next to a white sweater and red garment on the rack, appears blurred by a swift movement of the camera, her head fading in the clothes. Stylishness connotes the dresses the people in the room are wearing: whereas the blurring young woman at left is in a casual blueish miniskirt and creamy sweater, the top of her round thighs nicely visible, the two ladies at right instead, one facing the viewer and the other seen from the back, appear clothed respectively in a pink and in a golden evening gown that generously half bares their breast. The right-hand side view of the room is partly obstructed by the beck of one of the two men, in a dark suit, seated, while the picture’s center is starkly dominated, in an extreme foreground, by the full back view of the second man, who appears presiding over this assembly of fashion gods — his poised body in a blue suit (almost an armor) parallel to the picture plane. The sharpness of this reverse frontality recalls the way in which Carpaccio, in the panel “The Ambassadors Return to the English Court" of the Stories from the Life of St. Ursula cycle (now in the Accademia in Venice), embodies the gaze of an entire society in the figure isolated at center in the canvas' foreground, with his beck fully turned to the viewer. This herald in a sumptuous red hat and lavishly decorated golden dress, his left hand holding a folded sheet of paper behind his waist, directs the scene in front of him: the bank of a canal filled with a crowd of dignitaries, and a background of fantastic Quattrocento architectures. The light that anchors the partying circle in Metropolitan comes from the half-naked breast and glass of white wine reverberating over it of the woman in a frontal position we glimpse at last, her embroidered pink skirt heightening the gold of the plain long dress worn by the lady in front of her. The three women in this image hold all a glass of white wine, either full or empty, as should also the two men since their arms appear raised, giving to the scene the meaning of an intimate Dionysiac rite in the digital age of painting.

— Mario Diacono