Robert Longo at Pace
The Robert Longo show at Pace turns the multiple floors of the gallery into colliding channel-surfing, doom-scrolls of massive drawings that sample our moment - but Longo’s images aren’t just pictures of current events- they’re pictures of pictures- they’re about pictures and how the rules, bounds and politics of images shape and steer us and how the rushing flow of those pictures might be paused to reveal the codes writhing within. This is the Pictures Generation project. Look closely at any of these and the breakdown of image becomes literal- riots of marks and gestures, erasures, and ghostly dustings of charcoal are the painstaking analogue to the slowed, close reading required of our image world.
Each floor of drawings is literally weighted by a single sculpture - a bronze year of newspapers, Dürer’s Solid from Melencolia, and a call back to Longo’s prescient 1990 Black Flags. Each of these is a pivot point, an anchor to the physical even as we recognize that they too are representations- replicas of the real.
Historian Fred Licht suggested that in Caravaggio the extreme contrast of the paintings was more than protocinematic- it represented the painter’s world view - where the experience of humankind was shaped by the conflict of dark and light, a visualizing of the struggle of good and evil.
Longo’s theology is more humanist or posthumanist but in his chiaroscuro images the collision of obscuring dark and untouched white gives form to a contested world pictured. The burden of our navigating this conflicted world of images and finding a path amidst the pictures is Longo’s “Weight of Hope.”
Back on the street after viewing the show - colliding Longo images are everywhere- busses, billboards, newsstands, kiosks, our endless phone-served news feed of atrocities, Ads, etc… and by seeing these now as “Longos” we gain a conceptual pause button on the torrent that surrounds us - the pictures step outside their flow for a moment, “the frame[s] of things disjoint,” and in that grasping moment of collision, grief, and hope is a whiff of possible freedom.
Robert Longo: The Weight of Hope on view at Pace Gallery 540 W 25th St thru Oct 25h