Robert Longo on Grappling With Heavy Politics and Delicate Beauty ‘I Can Do Whatever I Want’
By Emily Steer
It is impossible to view an image in total isolation. In an unavoidably digital world, we are used to seeing images as part of a chaotic mass. On top of this, each one comes loaded with an abundance of pre-existing connections and projections, both personal and collective. This is rich territory for the masterful visual manipulator Robert Longo.
For his new two-part exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac and Pace in London, the U.S. artist returns to the ‘Combines’ format he first explored in the 1980s. Within two central works in “Searchers” (on view until November 9), the violent and political collide with the commercial and aesthetic, underscoring their inherently entangled nature.
“Those early ‘Combines’ were like sentence structures,” said Longo in an interview as the exhibitions opened. “There’s a verb, a noun, an adjective. There was always some weird narrative in my mind, but I wanted to make that quite difficult to read.” He was inspired to revisit this format when he noticed the powerful effect of a four-part archive piece, Master Jazz (1982-3), as it was shown in Walter Hopps’s exhibition with the Menil Collection (2023). This work reverberates with the silent scream of the central close-up face, which sits between a skyscraper, two suited figures, and a sleeping woman.
His two new “Combines” works, each seven feet wide, are comprised of five individual pieces that loom like billboards. At Ropac, Untitled (Pilgrim) features a luxurious rendering of a Chanel diamond necklace. Its oversized jewels twinkle alluringly against a slick black background. To its left, a video of fire rages behind a cage-like silver frame. Untitled (Pilgrim) also includes an intricate charcoal rendering of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s emotionally ambiguous marble sculpture Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-52); a collection of 3D-printed twigs, enlarged and painted to read as branches; and a vibrant blue photograph of an iceberg melting. While the gallery viewer should probably pay more attention to the icecap, the eye keeps sliding back to the sparkling jewels. The Chanel necklace is taken from an advert that Longo found wrapped around the New York Times. He was struck by this image of glossy commerce covering devastating global news.
Each of the five panels represents a different form of art—drawing, painting, video, sculpture, and photography—although Longo renders them slippery. The Chanel panel, for example, at first appears to be one of the artist’s meticulous charcoal drawings. Then its gloopy surface comes into view, and it seems to be a painting. It is, in fact, a high-gloss print of a painting covering layers of newspaper. An image of the American flag is hidden within this dark void, as well as Margot Robbie’s Barbie. “Fake news!” he laughed, standing in front of this print of a painting of an advert. “Art is all a point of view. I want to undermine the idea of authenticity.”
