Adrian Ghenie: Roman Campagna Exhibition review

By Patrick Javault 

In Roman Campagna, Adrian Ghenie takes on a cliché: that of the artist moved to the core by his encounter with the Eternal City. He shatters this cliché by infusing it with his own obsessions, employing a sense of ellipsis and a taste for the grotesque. In settings mostly inspired by the Appian Way, he places characters in trainers with alien heads and hunched silhouettes before a sculpted urn or Seneca’s tomb. More than a caricatured vision of the tourist, it conveys a sense of the profound incongruity of homo contemporaneus in places that invite contemplation and meditation. Either these figures cannot behave themselves whilst urinating on a monument, or they burst with emotion at the sight of a sunset over one of the hills. The dominant tones are brown and grey, with occasional bursts of bright colour to produce very specific effects. This sense of incongruity sometimes verges on alienation, with absurd tubes and connections—for example, between a stone tomb and a laptop. 
Rather than Roman masters, it is Francis Bacon and the world of William S. Burroughs that Adrian Ghenie seems to have in mind. He alludes directly to Bacon by drawing inspiration from the latter’s reinterpretation of Vincent van Gogh’s self-portrait to depict a man with a rucksack and a grimacing face beneath a black umbrella. One might speak of a cycle, a way of recreating an experience of Rome—where the artist has made his home—with a certain intensity. Adrian Ghenie does not hesitate to copy the composition of the fish mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii, making it truly his own. On the first floor of the gallery, a series of large charcoal drawings on paper reveals how Ghenie constructs his paintings and invents his contemporary figures, hunched over their smartphones, which he will later shatter in his paintings.

Translated from French