Navigating the River of Time: Recent Portraits by Jorg Dubin

“Now for a breath I tarry/Nor yet disperse apart/Take my hand quick and tell me/What have you in your heart?”
A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

The tradition of portraiture is as timeless as it gets, right?
The tradition of rendering nudes with 24-Hour Fitness bodies in order to capture a moment that exists through eternity, usually represented in the third dimension with marble, has endured mostly intact without losing any vitality and relevance through this past century of stylistic –isms, hasn’t it?
            Mostly intact? Not in the hands of Jorg Dubin it hasn’t. Relevant? Never more so the case. These 12 portraits may belong to the tradition of portraiture in terms of likeness, physiognomy, expression and technique. But then red cheeks suddenly flicker, downcast eyes seem to look up, body parts pixilate, brushstrokes murmur, flesh drips like a candle melts to reveal not bones but…rebar? It’s like a Wicked Witch of the West melt-down.
            Moreover, the figures don’t exist in a clearly distinguishable space. They fuse into it, they blend into their murky environment. His figure/ground relationship represents the two-dimensional equivalent of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave that emerges from a slab of marble. The colors are not vibrant but a lighter shade of pale: they’re not sepulchral but they’re not fauve, either.
            Not that Dubin’s nudes aren’t somewhat classical; they follow in the tradition of Velazquez and Manet. He doesn’t cull his figures, blemish-free, bodies toned, from the pages of J.Crew catalogues. No, they’re Junoesque and quirky, they sport girl-curves, they luxuriate in their flesh and the paint of their existence. They are sensuality and poetry made incarnate in flesh.
            What sets Dubin’s nudes apart from the sort of thing you’d see in the Malibu Getty is their non-static quality. His figures move but not in the sense of movement arrested for a nonce; a pose. Rather they evolve into something else, they morph in front of our eyes. Their nudity is not a permanent state but simply a temporary condition, an on-going process from clothed to nude to ash to dust to nothing. Dubin’s theme is the ephemeral and fragile quality of life.
            Girl with Scarf. She’s got the kind of bunned hair that you would see in a Van Eyck portrait, her demeanor’s calm demeanor, her face carefully rendered. But as you move down her body, you notice that her right arm has disintegrated, or at least begun to regress into a smudge. Same with her left shoulder, her right breast. From the waist down, she’s nothing but cross hatches and striations. She looks like a Terminator android with her infrastructure and circuitry exposed.
            It’s the same with the other 11 portraits. Each depicts bodies on the verge of a melt-down.  Think of Socrates when he drinks his hemlock and how the paralysis works up from his toes until it reaches his heart.
            Dubin does not make his figures or their decomposition sinister or gross. Sure, flesh does decompose here but his is not the meat locker flesh of Chaim Soutine. In terms of context these images resemble they resemble more of Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, a mortal embodiment of eternity whose existence is tinged not with angst, not with remorse but with a resigned inevitability.
            Dubin introduces the flux of time into these 12 images, more specifically, he recalls the element of memory. Think of the Greek philosopher Heraclites’s metaphor of time as a river. If time is a river, then Dubin paints times eddies, pockets of calm surrounded by swirls and whorls. Lay the pieces on the ground and it’s like looking at a face-up figure that floats atop a surging stream. The rippled surface of the water is punctuated by items clearly articulated and highlighted: a kneecap, the bridge of a nose, a pierced navel, a nipple, a ring, a necklace, the play of light on a earring, the whisper of a smile.  It’s like standing on the deck of the Calpurnia and watching individual lights of the Titanic disappear under the water.
Dubin composes these elements into a sweeping S-curve that guides the eye across the shimmering surface of the plane, down the body, into the murky depths below. The rest of the body nestles just under the surface of a scrim of water; this explains the mottled and waxy texture of the skin. It’s not sensuous skin, soft to the touch but rather skin in movement, skin that becomes something else. It’s like when you view your reflection onto the water from a rowboat until the wind slowly dissipates that image.
            Because memory is too inconsistent and vague, Dubin sanctifies the moment we view each figure. He wants us to hold onto these palpable objects that prick the surface of the water and of our consciousness as long as we can until the body, indeed, the memory of the body, drifts away into oblivion. Dubin does not mount a recovery effort but a quiet as-is memorial; like the Battleship Arizona’s resting place at Pearl Harbor. As we testify to the wistful, smoky-eyed dissolution of these bodies, each figure seems to say, “Get a good look at me now, I won’t inhabit this body, this space, this time, much longer.”