Black-and-white portraits, whether drawn, painted or photographed, bring to mind the fugitive quality of human identity, as if the luster of self-awareness, pressed into space day after day, had faded. Such monochromes seem to reproach the extravagance of a world spent in color as they soberly weigh the contradictions of presence and distance.
Most of the paintings, drawings and sculptures by the five artists
at the exhibit The Human Subject, curated by Tim Knapp
for Cleveland State University, are strikingly, even intrusively
personal, like a stranger’s face in a mirror, and are devoid of any but
the palest traces of color. This is a show, not of ghosts, but of
personalities lingering in a ghost world.
There are no weak artists at The Human Subject, but the
strongest is probably Susan Hauptman, whose meticulously drawn
large-scale charcoal-on-paper self-portraits have become famous over
the past two decades and are shown here courtesy of New York’s Forum
Gallery. They depict an androgynous woman pared down to the human
essentials of her physical appearance, like a prisoner or a
saint. Her head is always shaved or nearly so, and sometimes she
is nude, from the waist down or the waist up; far from being sensual,
the partial nudity is always a clinically matter-of-fact, aesthetic
decision. In the 2003 “Self Portrait (With Dancers),” Hauptman’s
perfectly rendered face — indistinguishable from a photographic
print — is like a wan sun, rising above a patterned sweater. All
of the four drawings here are full-face. Hauptman looks at the viewer
with hooded eyes and an enigmatic or sad expression. In “Self Portrait
(With Leonard),” (2006), where she is clad in a vintage black gown, her
head rests against her husband’s plaid patterned shirt. The man (writer
Leonard Post) is shown in profile, his hawk-like nose and leftward gaze
as solidly horizontal as the beam of a cross. While Hauptman’s singular
self-portraits are like icons, bulging with a presence barely
restrained in two dimensions, this composition is more like a pieta:
Hauptman leans in exhaustion against the plaid; the crisscross
composition climbs up the picture plane as if prefiguring an
Ascension.
In many ways, Clevelander Baila Litton’s labor-intensive, six- or
eight-foot tall heads are at least as astonishing as Hauptman’s more
restrained half-lengths. While Hauptman explores the ambiguities
of self-image and gender perception and the uses of ultra-realistic
depiction to invoke an archetypal realm, Litton accumulates a wealth of
graphic detail to build her portraits. Her women of various races and
cultures are many times life-size and include fragments of cloth and
other materials, collaged onto surfaces stitched together in a grid
from multiple sheets of paper. These are homages to the complexity and
depth of women’s experience, suggesting that a straightforward drawing,
no matter how faithful to the subject, needs to be supplemented by a
life’s worth of other information.
London-based Sean Henry makes bronze sculptures of people dressed in
casual, often rumpled street clothes. His figures vary from a little
less than half life size, down to about a third, and while they’re more
colorized than colorful, they fit in well with the overall grisaille of
the exhibition, giving an account of human presence that examines the
importance of scale to the processes of recognition and identification.
Neither toys nor waxwork-style replicas, Henry’s sculptures establish
their own type of space, like visitors from a smaller world.
Also passing through our perception rather than living among us are
the estranged-seeming, displaced figures drawn beautifully in pencil on
panel and sealed under a thin, even, sensuous coat of transparent wax
by New York-based Jenny Scobel. Scobel’s moonlit portraits mix and
match heads with a variety of more or less suitable torsos, a little
like paper dolls. This aspect of her work is not emphasized at CSU, but
if there is no beauty without some strangeness in the proportion,
Scobel’s figures are beautiful indeed, subtly playing havoc with fixed
notions of identity based on race, costume and era.
Misha Kligman emigrated to the U.S. from Kazan, Russia, in 1995,
subsequently earning his BA from CSU. Currently the artist lives and
works in Kansas City, making paintings and drawings that explore the
darkness and wealth of Russian-Jewish heritage. Half-erased by the
damage of history, Kligman’s small mixed-media work “The Soldier”
envisions his ancestry as a coiling root system, a network revealed and
obscured in endless underground ramifications. If in our time identity
is a lost letter onto which presence is pasted like a postage-due
stamp, then Kligman’s two small oil-on-panel paintings of passport
photos, both with the lower-right corner torn off, sum up the exhibit
at CSU: Any version of identity will always be missing a piece.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2009.