A major function that media-assisted art (thanks perhaps to the art-historical repercussions of both Duchamp's assisted ready-mades and Warhol's ready-made icons) has exerted since Pop in the Sixties has been providing a mediation between images (that is: the contextual and consensual relationship offered to a viewer between icons and space, between sign and symbol) grounded on a collective language and the artist's personal phantasms. These latter not only define one's psychic constructs, but also structure the idiolectal process of constructing a picture. Damian Loeb has forged a bold and at times ribald mode of representation out of using photographic templates (which were nonetheless intensely, theatrically, and at first even populistically manipulated) for making elusive narrative paintings, compositionally sharpened by his filmic immediacy in framing an action caught in the moment of becoming visual history. For a time, Loeb's images were based on deconstructed and differently recomposed actual movie frames, something that accounts for his giving movie-derived titles also to the works he has made in the last two years, which are instead modeled on photographs he himself has taken traveling around the country. This implies that, of all new media, cinema rather than still photography has had the greatest impact on his picture making; and that the tension rising in his images between composition and movement must therefore be considered as one between classical painting and film. Cinema has instilled in the modes of art a further democratic impulsion, since its being primarily directed to a collective audience has stimulated a desire to orient a work toward action rather than mood, toward a social rather than a purely subjective inscription. Loeb's pictures nonetheless lean more toward the mythical than the historical, since he tends to crop as much description and psychology as possible out of an image, conflating detail of figure with vastitude of space and massiveness of social scene, softening the edges of representation not in order to suggest a lyrical state of affairs conducive to an upheaval of emotions but to further a distance between the action represented and the art presented, as if we were forever watching Vermeer exalting his trade, his back turned to us.
Ever since the fabled use of a camera obscura by the Dutch Master for pictures like View of Delft, the lens has entered the history and practice of painting as an advanced mechanical devise for enhancing the representation of spatial relationships and of contrasts of light. The changes it has brought about in the production of optical/perspectival effects, in the construction of the pictorial image, and in the sharp or tampered-with differentiations of focus between fore and backgrounds read like the march toward Modernism and the many varieties of contemporary photo-related art (which may be based however not simply on the use of a camera, but also on already existing photographs, or on photographic illustrations). And they have unfailingly generated interrogations on the future and existence of painting. Over time, the magic of the lens always seemed to undermine the power of the brush. As quoted by Martin Kemp in The Science of Art (1990), the appearance of the camera obscura already in 1622 was provoking this reaction by Constantijn Huygens: "It is impossible to express its beauty in words. The art of painting is dead, for this is life itself, or something higher, if we could find a word for it." But the necessity of always being one symbolic step ahead of its social environment has constantly led painting to an adjustment to, or an adoption of, any mechanical advancement in the production of images. The artist may today enlist in the creation of a painting project not just the camera, but also the reworking through computer programs of what is produced with it. More than that: photo-derived representation, abstractionist modality, and conceptualist approach now tend to coalesce in the same picture, preconsciously conflated in a modus operandi that brings into the making of the work any intellectual tool available on the market of ideas and technologies.
The shift occurred in Loeb's work, from the rephrasing of existing filmic frames in a single pictorial event to the direct construction of an imaginal subject matter by framing an instance of reality with his own camera (mechanically customized to generate widescreen-like photographs, corresponding to a horizontal double square to be transposed on a homologous canvas), has also resulted in more socially charged, more painterly and intense pictures. Deliverance (2005, oil on linen, 48x96 inches; the title lifted from the John Boorman film of 1972 in which city-dwelling, male intellectuals vacationing in the wilderness are sexually attacked by demonic local farmers on a hunting expedition) presents an image that may well, if uncannily, repeat a "St. George and the Dragon" archetype. On a freeway in the midst of a mountainous landscape (that of Mt. Hood, Oregon), the back of a black Lincoln town car, occupying at right by itself almost two-thirds of the entire canvas, seems to run away from a man in jeans, of whom we can only see the central part of his legs (from ankle to thigh), monumentally planted in the foreground. All the spare details are vividly leaping to the eye in the extremely cropped view of a modem road tale: the left blue-dressed leg silhouetted against asphalt trees' mountain and sky, the right one posted against the left backside of the car, partially hiding the 'red tail-light; next to it, the chrome frame enclosing the license plate, of which only the first two letters, ZF, are visible and to its left the bright plain glass of the backing light. The car's shiny bottom rear neatly reflects the trees and sky in the landscape, while a human shadow rising ominously over them at center darkly produces an accidental self-portrait of the artist, while the image's remaining one-third opposes the massive, excessive, and obsessive presence of the black car - and the ultramarine-blue pants/legs that appear in an ancient struggle with it - the soft, silvery, and greenish fugitive memory of clouds covering the horizon, distant mountains, gray pavement protected by the gray guardrail. The painting's visual essence is conveyed in the lens-produced contrast of the soft-focused blue legs with the sharp-focused black-and-chrome car - a discrepancy that runs intuitively counter to the spatial position of the latter on a plane behind the extreme foreground of the former. This photographic strategy was almost preordained in Vermeer's Officer and Laughing Girl (now in the Frick Collection): many historians have noted how the officer's figure in the foreground, while larger proportionally, is otherwise out of focus with respect to the girl and to the strikingly clear map of Holland hanging in the background. Loeb's motive in creating a similar inversion might have been that of injecting a subliminal antagonism in the focal, opposition of man to machine, suggesting the struggle on the road to Damascus of a Tobias with either his angel or his demon.
— Mario Diacono