Adrian Ghenie’s Untitled from 2019 is an important example demonstrating the artist’s ability to capture psychological intensity. Ghenie’s meteoric rise to fame has seen the artist become one of the leading painters of his generation, his work marked by a combination of blurred, rough textures and chiaroscuro tones which are at t.mes s shapeless, but elsewhere sharply outlined with the artist’s almost photograph definition. Depicting a mass of vulnerable limbs ambiguously placed on the vivid red couch, Untitled is painted in sweeps of crimson, canary yellow and amber, swirling and pulsating to illuminate the artist’s energetic handing of paint. Aiming at a sensual, intuitive perception of figuration, Ghenie’s combining of chaos and order affects the viewer on a physiological and visceral level.

Exploiting the tension between abstraction and figuration, Ghenie’s paintings recall the contemporary abstractions of Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild, as well the Old Masters in terms of both composition and colour. Revelling in painting’s theatricality, Ghenie particularly admires the work of David Lynch, whose gently disquieting, dreamlike films bare a distinctly dark and mysterious undercurrent. Composed with a virtuoso sense of performance and suspense, Ghenie’s treatment of light and shadow in the present work reveals a composition constructed like a stage-set. The central action of the distorted figure lying atop the couch is lit against an ambiguous domestic space, with a warm light reflecting on the wall from the invisible space beyond the canvas. Depicted in vivid red hues and fleshy browns, the figurative dance between revelation and concealment is Rembrandt-eque in its treatment of the portraiture form, the artist expertly balancing moments of shadow with those of luminosity. As Ghenie proclaims, “I want a deconstruction of the portrait. In the 20th century, the people who did it really radically were Picasso and Bacon. They took elements of the face and rearranged it…The portrait was a landscape, basically” (Adrian Ghenie quoted in Andy Battaglia, “‘Every Painting Is Abstract’: Adrian Ghenie on His Recent Work and Evolving Sense of Self,” ARTnews, 17 February 2017, online).

Born in Romania in 1977, Ghenie came across a catalogue of Dutch paintings from The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, which had a profound effect on him, forming the basis for his encyclopaedic knowledge of art history. Recalling his first visit to the museum in 2017, “I remember there was a window open and a curtain blowing in the wind; this detail and the memory of it gave me a lot of peace. To me the museum felt like a home for art, not like a temple to art” (the artist, quoted in “Adrian Ghenie: 'I Have Turned My Only Face…'”, Museum exhibition press release, Thaddaeus Ropac, online). Continuing Ghenie’s sustained engagement with the history of painting, Untitled shows the artist deconstructing the image more than ever before, inviting the viewer to decipher the shifting forms in his sensuously painted canvas.

Ghenie’s rich surface of pigment is layered, mutable and ambiguous; the distinction between figure and environment is blurred despite tangible glimpses of a pair of white, blue-striped socks and the vibrant red of a couch. Working in visceral, highly textured passages of paint, Ghenie scrapes at pigment on both the figure’s bulbous form and the shadowy interior, invoking a strong sense of psychological interiority reflected in the surrounding vista. Threatening to melt away as if a mirage, Untitled is a celebration and deeply-felt love of art history and the potentiality of paint to convey alternative realities. Ghenie’s meticulous build-up of pigment forms a compelling allegory for the layers of temporality, perception and reality that accumulate over t.mes .