Mary Boone Gallery is pleased to present a new group of paintings by acclaimed artist Damian Loeb. For the past five years, Loeb has concentrated on depicting the world as cinema in itself, or, in the words of French theorist Gilles Deleuze, ‘metacinema’. Unlike other art forms, cinema does not raise itself up as a mimetic image of the world, but rather weaves itself into the world, becoming the world as the world becomes it. For ours is the cinematic century, one in which we are perpetual viewers of images that play on our existing and familiar concepts of reality. These images project an illusion that we experience as if it were a fully realized world and not merely a representation- a collapse, if you like, of the hitherto rigid Platonic dualism between reality and representation.
And yet, the simulacrum of the cinematic image does more than simply displace the grounded notion of the ‘real’; it finds archetypal images that reside deep within us, and releases them into our consciousness. It is precisely this that Loeb takes as his artistic ideal, seeking to plumb the very depths of what Jung termed the ‘collective unconscious’, the region of the mind/body that lies beyond the narrow, brightly lit domain of consciousness. According to Jungian psychology, we are all haunted by the same kind of demons and monsters in our psyche, and it is for this reason that we can communicate, not just rationally, but aesthetically, intuitively, emotionally, in the realm of the unconscious. It is only the truly great works of art that are able to tap into the archetypes that live within our psyche, by entering the realm of the unreal and the irrational to create images that are alive and meaningful and speak to us all.
So, the focus is on the power of the image in phenomenological terms, in cinema’s ability to provoke wonder, awe and astonishment, as well as instill fear and horror. In Loeb’s most ambitious project to date, he has chosen the oft-undervalued genres of horror and science fiction, which have long been derided as ‘commercial’ genres, separate from higher art forms, as subject matter for his hyper-realistic paintings. In the age of hyper-reality, no distance remains between reality and the imaginary models used to conceive it. Similarly, in Loeb’s choice of genres, there is a collapse of the distance between the real and its imaginary projections. Both genres stretch the capacity of human imagination to conceive of alternate realities in order to fathom the deeper meanings that underlie everyday life- a form of ‘creative mythology’, if you like. For a myth is, primarily, a mixture of elements- the universal in conjunction with the specific, the fantastic and magical alongside the everyday. According to writer Joseph Campbell, “the artist is the one who communicates myth for today.” And so Loeb, inspired by the symbolic motifs of horror and sci-fi , draws us deep within, into a world where our darkest fears and concerns reign supreme, that realm of underwater monsters, of mysterious shadows lurking at street corners, of a future controlled by robots and computers.
Horror, with its mythological undertones, anchors the unknown and the fantastic in images that are familiar and realistic. Thus, the prototypical horror flick relies on lulling us into a false sense of security through its use of the familiar, these mundane, suburban, domestic scenes, creating an easily-recognizable world of moms, dads, sisters, brothers, and babysitters, then undercutting this with brief and shocking interludes of horror, as we see in movies like John Carpenter’s Halloween and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Consequently, ambience becomes central to the genre, perhaps more so than the traditional character development which bounds movies of other genres. And it is this ambience that Loeb seeks to convey in his sweeping, cinematic canvases; these moments of apparent calm that precede the horror and make it all the more potent.
Like the horror genre, science fiction is intended to stir our emotions, our subconscious, and our mythological leanings. Its images strive to remove us from a known world, replacing it with an abstracted, hyper-real world, resplendent with tableaux of incongruous shapes and constructions, as found in the archetypal movies of this genre, such as Ridley Scott’s Alien and Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 2001:Space Odyssey. The iconography is at once alien, yet strangely familiar, as if we have seen it all before in a dream: Loeb depicts white, hexagonal hallways whose geometrical pattern stretches interminably. It is an articulation of our present-day fantasies, which is why we feel a sense of vertigo as we stand before Loeb’s canvases, as if on the edge of a parallel world that is contingent with the ‘real’. It lets us make the transition across ontological boundaries into ‘other’ realms, postulating multiple worlds, worlds of space-stations and control rooms, subterranean worlds, that are fantastic, yet seem part-real at the same time. And it is this inherent paradox that is a necessary precondition of the genre; it takes elements that are familiar to us, whether they are ‘real, or from the realm of our subconscious, and creates a slightly skewed, unfamiliar version of our own world.
With this series, Loeb illustrates the dissipation of horror and science fiction as domains of the imagination autonomous from reality. Cinematic image becomes the world picture, in the words of Heidegger, as the world becomes it. His indelible images blur the boundary between the real and unreal, the familiar and the unfamiliar, reuniting the conscious and unconscious realms and seamlessly interweaving the fantastic with the mundane, through his characteristic, invisible brushwork. It is also particularly fitting that he succeeds in disintegrating not just these boundaries, but also the false dichotomy between high/low culture and between art/entertainment, which has for too long segregated horror and science fiction as mass-market and therefore of little worth. With Horror and Sci-Fi, Loeb succeeds in capturing the reality of the unreal, breathing life into the images that haunt our subconscious and offering us a glimpse into the deep, dark domain of the unknown.