Jorg Dubin at Peter Blake

One of the more heartening developments in contemporary art has been the return of figuration and representation in drawing, painting and sculpture, the kind of work I have been studying and exhibiting for the last fifteen years. As the iron grip of Modernist strictures weakened, figuration and representation underwent a serious comeback in the 1980s, and by 2000 a critical mass of senior and junior artists were producing significant work. Many have become virtuoso draughtsmen (women included!), though they often had to teach themselves, as so many academic art programs had abandoned instruction in life drawing, painting and mastery of traditional media and materials. These resurgent “representationalists” are now producing compelling still-lifes, portraiture, figural and nude studies, landscape and narratives – and engaging with old and new ideas about content, even beauty.

Among these is the Laguna Beach painter Jorg Dubin. Since the turn of this century he has departed from his earlier “horror allegory’ narrative paintings that, while certainly powerful on one level, may have been too indebted for their own good to the mystical, pagan, and disturbingly transgressive angst found in the big canvases of the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum. The notion of the “extreme,” whether in sports, popular music, “reality televison” or the stylized films of Quentin Tarentino (stories of implausible behavior without any discernible ends) has begun to wear out its welcome in our culture. This may be true in contemporary figurative art as well. Too few figurative practitioners have been able to really integrate the hard material of history, the human condition and its complexity into an aesthetic image, so its worth mentioning two who have had consistently better fortunes with their challenging efforts: New York’s Jerome Witkin and Los Angeles’ Stephen Douglas.

In conversations with Dubin, Douglas is frequently, graciously, acknowledged as a mentor; indeed, his shaved head and goateed visage are regular presences in Dubin’s portraits and figurative compositions, peering out to take the measure of the viewer’s regard. Douglas’ own paintings often deploy flamboyant clothing and an array of props wherein the setting and the sitter’s psychology are merged – the “extremes” of subject, pose and surroundings held in a delicate yet sure balance. In other words, the seeming unruliness of a Douglas tableau, when successful, is reigned in by its plausibility – virtuosity that has an end in sight; and when a work occasionally fails, just as high wire acts sometimes plummet into the safety net, Douglas doesn’t hesitate to wryly write them off as “oil spills.”

The virtuosity of one’s mentor, however, produces in the mentored the anxiety of influence, to borrow a phrase from the literary critic Harold Bloom. Moreover, the Modernist legacy does not permit apprentices the appropriation of the modes of the master, and threatens to label any offender with the scarlet letter “D” for “derivative.” So it comes as no surprise that Dubin’s portraits and figural compositions minimize the sort of scenic trappings one encounters in a Douglas work.

Consider the example of White Room, wherein the neutral-toned floor and walls serve as the container for Dubin’s young male subject whose sanguine hands and chiseled, rectilinear facial planes set the tone for the coiled intensity of its squatting subject. The few objects scattered about the floor - a telephone handset, a plastic water bottle, a nondescript book – are ethereal in comparison to the human presence.

The crouching male model appears again in Walls, Doors and Reflections, a vertical work in which he appears to turn inward - reflecting. He should. The model is under the probing gaze of his delineator, Dubin, who appears at left. The artist’s mentor, Douglas, is at right in the deepest space of the painting. In effect, both artists “contain” the brooding model. Dubin’s self-portrait reveals a very present being – assertive, compositionally foregrounded. Douglas, the mentor/master, lounges in the background, his head canting the opposite direction from his pupil. With its arrangement of monotone planes, this Post-Modern figurative grouping could also be entitled Composition in White, Black and Gray.

Such an association has echoes in art history, recalling of course J.M.W. Whistler’s supra-famous, neutral-toned painting of his mother seated in profile. For a number of the new generation of figurative painters, however, the art historical legacy of representational art provides another source of anxiety. The persistence of Modernism’s baleful dismissiveness of the art of the past have made artists feel uneasy and self-conscious in the presence of the staggering virtuosities of Western painting from Giotto to Velazquez to Sargent. Maybe a better strategy would entail a bit of “deconstructing” of one’s own work rather than earnestly giving oneself over to the riches of the past.
         

This is Dubin’s approach in works like Well Seeker Revisited where the female model (who seems to be taking a break from formal posing) is “doubled” by her reflection in a mirror. The illusion of the pensive figure in the long, spatial corridor, however, is disrupted by a network of dripping streams of paint at the lower portion of the canvas – the artist’s reminder that painterly illusion is constructed by manipulation of pigments and optics. Similarly and taken further in Reflection With Door Knob, Dubin, after painting his ruddily-rimmed portrait, diffuses his lower body with a hasty pattern of scrubs, smears and liquid drips. While this energizes the lower portion of the body with gestural rhythms, providing an exciting contrast to the artist’s visage above, the viewer might not be faulted for his/her yearning for Dubin to take an occasional time-out from testing the limits of painterly deconstruction.

Feed, however, may be Dubin’s via media between deconstruction and faithful representation. Re-visiting a venerable subject in Western painting, the Madonna/mother and child, the artist has focused on the essential intimacy of nurture. Comprised of a formal yet warm arrangement of crescents, circles and ovals, our eyes are drawn to the cradled infant whose whole world is its mother’s breast and face (implied by the baby’s upper gaze). The glowing whites are balanced with the pinks, corals and peach tones of human skin. The composition is resolved in the central interaction and this may be where Dubin’s penchant for deconstruction is put to its happiest use. He locates his scumbles, smears and drips within an energized perimeter around his figures where these expressive marks encourage our eye to “find” the warm, tender drama at the painting’s core.

The joy one experiences in Dubin’s most recent work is his full-throated use and depiction of the figure. It is a welcome return from a long hiatus where the human presence was missing from contemporary art. And after such an interval we should not be surprised that the sort of humanity that reappears on the painter’s canvas is a bit sassy, taut in form and ready to prance (MX with Gold Shoes).

Gordon L. Fuglie
Director
Laband Art Gallery
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles (November 17, 2003)