16 April – 22 May 2016

Luminous Discontent was an exhibition of new work by American artist Robert Longo, of his large-scale charcoal drawings and sculpture spanning the three floors of the Paris Marais gallery.

Longo constructed the exhibition for the gallery space with a collision of epic images.

First, the viewer encountered, from a distance, a large-scale abstraction, Untitled (Shipwreck, Redux), 2016. A blurred mass, seeming somehow both from the future and the past, denying the viewer a legible first impression. This piece set the tone for Longo’s exhibition: initially disorienting, then urging that the viewer shifts focus, transcends vision, and instead accesses a deeper, more visceral instinct and intuition. 

On the ground floor, muted words vibrated off the walls; words from an unsent love letter by Beethoven appear barely visible. The cracked ice of a massive iceberg calls across the space to the fractures of a bullet hole in a plate glass window from Paris. Longo’s works reflected our time, teeming with entropy and uncertainty.

A new body of work based on X-rays of paintings by Van Gogh and the Old Masters was on view on the first floor. About this series, Olivia Murphy wrote, “We see the brutality of the nails hammered into the stretcher, we see the cracks and the physicality of paint that has decomposed over time, we see the essence of the work as we know it through the obscured details of its under-image. We see the unseen, the internal aura that is held within the painting, visible only through x-ray technology; we see the soul. In a way, the translation and veneration of these paintings into drawings becomes like a beatification, sainting them into Longo’s art historical heaven.”

Luminous Discontent, investigated through scale and the medium of charcoal, how a belief in the unseen breeds an opposition of forces, trust and skepticism, hope and fear.  Through Longo’s work, light illuminated our history and reflects back to us our chaotic present.