Marlene Dumas "Light and Dark 1987-2007"
at Gallery Koyanagi
in the Ginza, Shimbashi area
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Her work is upfront in its portrayal of life and death; in the white canvases the faces and figures are vivid and clear and you can feel the heat of human existence. This is death that is neither romanticized nor feared but simply exists as a fact. In one corner of the gallery, life and death harmonize and melt into each other, creating a surprising but stunning interpretation of living.
The Fog of War (2006) is a beautiful series of ink gesture digital prints accompanied by a poem. Each line of her poem is imbued with the bleakness of her outlook: feelings of melancholy, anguish, sorrow and pain. This work, together with her poem, brings audiences to the psychological space to contemplate on the issues of war, death, justice, reason, dreams, hopes, ideals and reality. Faced with the death of human beings in war, she is honest in her handling of war’s effect of life – the questions of why we have to live and die – and she invites us to question our purpose as human beings.
In Kissing (2001) she achieves a sense of delicacy and lightness through her use of color and blending of shapes. The sense of movement in the work eloquently describes moments of love and affection, excitement, warmth, simplicity and naiveté – it captures a fleeting instant in a time of romance and the gentle flame therein.
Dumas uses a different type of visual language in Light and Dark, a work that is composed of powerful colors and a strong contrast of dark and light. There is weight and heaviness in the movement of the female figure depicted, and her body language communicates what she might be feeling. The work is heavy with silence and filled with unknowns. Viewers can relate to these moments of waiting, expecting and enduring. Maybe it is Dumas herself in the painting, there alone, enduring.
The far end of the gallery is dominated by a set of works made with death as its theme. Canary Death (2003) is a beautiful piece that features a white cadaver. While audiences can clearly feel the beauty of the painting, it is still unsettling to see a painting of a dead body in a public space like a gallery. Mystery surrounds the cause and manner of the person’s death – each viewer’s imagination will conjure up a different scenario for the depicted person’s death and they will all inevitably wonder what this death means to them. To Dream or Not to Dream (2006) has a similar quality to it: it is unclear whether the woman in the painting is alive or dead. If she is alive, what do her peculiar facial expressions suggest she is dreaming? If she is dead, her dreams would have reached their end. Similarly, the The Death of Ideology (2003) is a close-up of a dead face, and its expression and color make one wonder what it is that has died – what ideology was it that came to an end?
john Sebben
2007-11-23
wasn’t this show just a weak production of a second rate FRANCESCO CLEMENTE? With a few victims thrown for that oooohhhh aaaaaahhhh tsk tsk effect? her imagery was predictable and her skills are average at best.
Ashley Rawlings
2007-11-24
I wasn’t such a big fan of this show, especially seeing it in contrast to the main retrospective show held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Did you see that one as well?
I thought that was one of the best exhibitions Tokyo has seen this year, both in the strength of individual works and in the overall layout of the display.
What do you mean when you say her skills are average? Is it because her paintwork is watery and bleeds across the paper? For me, that was precisely what made the works so powerful - that she could elicit such a sense of bodily form and the texture of human skin from such thin paint is the definition of skill.
Ivy Watkins
2007-11-25
Well if you look at Francesco Clemente’s dreamy use of water color and a more advanced visual structure and mixture of composition elements and form without resorting to front page victims as strategy, you might just understand what John meant. Then try reading a little William Eggleston:
I am afraid that there are more people than I can imagine who can go no further than appreciating a picture that is a rectangle with an object in the middle of it, which they can identify. They don’t care what is around the object as long as nothing interferes with the object itself, right in the centre. Even after the lessons of Winogrand and Friedlander, they don’t get it. They respect their work because they are told by respectable institutions that they are important artists, but what they really want to see is a picture with a figure or an object in the middle of it. They want something obvious. The blindness is apparent when someone lets slip the word ’snapshot’. Ignorance can always be covered by ’snapshot’. The word has never had any meaning. I am at war with the obvious.
from the afterword of Democratic Forest
Ivy Watkins
2007-11-25
try reading Jerry saltz on her too you cna find his reviews on Artnet.com