DAMIAN LOEB

The Poetics of "Removable Presence"

Lee Klein

Damian Loeb, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

In the virtual office space of today quickly becoming tomorrow and both quickly becoming yesterday, we are all removable. The staff, the employed cadre of individuals presently before our eyes, is removable. Though their presence has at some point been requested or solicited or made possible by their own devices (if they are the party in need), they are in any context the human contents of such space and are each replaceable by their attainable commensurate. Furthermore, so too removable in all probability is the company they are in as this firm may only be fulfilling a momentary need in a temporary economy (or only a perceived need at that). Both the actors and the location are replaceable and are easily removed. The painter Damian Loeb in his young career has taken these occupational precepts and played an aesthetic variation of the vocational conditions, thereby rendering him the poet/painter of a world in which both everyone and everywhere is but a key stroke or a mouse click from being photoshopped away.

This simulated type of human environ (taken to its comic extreme in Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show) far from being a new phenomenon had its origins in the socio-economic landscape created by an arbitrary; invisible, and omni present creative force (the creation known as Utopia by its architect Sir Thomas More). The simulated quality of our lives is so pronounced that it seems that people vanish like browsed web pages. When people step off the stage of existence the human mind in this era of epic replication may be only able to register them as if they were in an ongoing movie. This may lead people to begin to question whether other people even existed in the material world at all. Is it all just film, the predominant metaphor of our age?

In Loeb's first exhibition at the uptown space of dealer Mary Boone in 2000, the then twenty-something painter offered a series of canvases whose environs were settings mostly lifted from other's photos and populated by actors of the painter's choosing. Subsequently, in his second exhibition (again at Mary Boone's Fifth Avenue space) he offered a narrative featuring a young Asian woman on-the-run traveling across a series of canvases whose scenery was of prefabricated origin. (These and all other Damian Loeb paintings may be seen on the web site www.damianloeb.com.) At his most recent exhibition, "Public Domain" at Mary Boone's new Chelsea gallery, Loeb left behind photographs as source material (after being sued by several lensmen, including Philip-Lorca diCorcia, who had captures some of the original pictures which the painter appropriated) and literally went to the movies. That is he has now removed all identifiable characters in in the painting of scenes from Hollywood films like Boogie Nights and Fight Club; all that remains in the figurative guise are chance players material to the movies but extraneous to the main pictorial purpose of the setting: a woman in lingerie on the bed derived from a still from Carnal Knowledge. (When he has his next exhibition, will his work again be created from major motion picture freeze frames? Perhaps following due course in his syntactical development will the painter then move in his own narrative or characters?)

In the painting I Hear the Word of the Lord (Public Domain), there is a motel court with an open quadrant with the revealed cabin rooms facing a parking lot, in the center of which is a swimming pool. Beside each chamber the car slot passes, and hanging above each is a pink light fluorescent against darkness. There is no character central to this canvas, No object as the focus of attention. It is a constant to this sort of picture - as it is to the random motels in small towns and on the outskirts of major cities or off highways throughout the nation - that the person checking into these spaces could be anyone or everyone. Their presence is at once both removable and unknown. The painter does not focus, and neither can the viewer, because of the disorienting form, very long and very short. By contrast, in the disturbing Deep South the neon of the sign is ablaze against the twilight sky as an Asian girl (the central and ill fated protagonist from the artist's "I Can Stop Anytime" series) is set off against the background of a motel. Thus an anonymous enclave is particularized by a discernable presence. Through this malleable painterly dialogue the characters exist and then they do not exist. In contrast to the logic of cinema there is no reason that characters once removed to placate the needs of a particularrfictive purpose cannot later be reintroduced.

The French painter Gustave Caillebotte depicted the Grand Boulevards of fin-de-siecle Paris with a palpable sense of presence, the balconies situating the viewer's gaze in the nineteenth-century romantic dream; for the Depression-formed Edward Hopper, the isolated citizen stares out at blank city space, the romantic dream darkened and inverted. In some of the American's canvases a sort of negative space of the mind is created; the individual's occupancy of their environment seems often so superfluous that they appear to sit in a state of suspended animation, their removable presence already assumed. Like Mark Tansey with his monochromatic historico-thematic canvases depicting philosophical, polemical, and aesthetic story lines of the painter's own directives and or imaginings, Damian Loeb uses file photos - new movie stills, among other sources such as art and fashion pictures - translated in polychrome to create a storyboard for a film manufactured by the artist from his own collages and synapses for both his and his viewers minds. Like Hopper with his anonymous urbia and, more recently, Eric Fischl with his disturbed underbelly of anonymous suburbia, Loeb, after appropriating the photographic work of others as the basis of his own work, articulates, though in a simulated manner, a portrait now renewed for the half-holographic, half-realtime of a strangely haunted and vacant - vacated - America.

The precariousness of our terrarium-like existence became self-evident when the twenty-five-year-old towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, after being punctured by arcing planes (only a few weeks after the thousand-year-old Buddhas of Afghanistan were brought down by bombs placed within the cliffs housing the statues from which they were carved). However in continuity, relative to the tragedy of the new situation, it can still be arguedt hat the friends and colleagues killed while playing their assigned roles in their daily work could be anyone. We all felt the tragedy and the emptiness. All inhabiting the present and concurrent paradigm share involvement in the scramble of placement in the settings of our juxtaposed yet adjacent lives. Thus the landscape we inhabit as members of a porous techno-economy and the predominant conditions we experience therein have brought us into an age where we exist in a precipitous communal state - which is the removable presence of us all. Damian Loeb's work now seems even more prescient about the societal code it articulates and the shaky ground it stakes in the yet to be fabricated times to follow.

LEE KLEIN writes on art frequently for NYarts and Gabriuszine.com. He is a contributing editor to Night and A Gathering of the Tribes. He recently recreated his infamous reading series The Literary Life at the National Arts Club in New York.