"We inevitably live in a post-WWII epoch, which means that we constantly have to look back to that watershed moment in order to understand our present condition."
A sumptuous melee of abstraction and figuration, The Trip blazes with psychological intensity. Illustrating an imagined post-war visit to Guernica by Picasso, the site of the modern master’s acclaimed 1937 canvas, the present tableau blends and blurs past and present, reality and imagination, into a brooding, dreamlike haze. Rich in evocation and metaphor, The Trip, executed in 2016, illustrates Adrian Ghenie’s virtuosic handling of paint and brush to explore the contradictions and paradoxes of a contemporary world both shaped and informed by the atrocities of the past.
The present work, depicting Pablo Picasso garbed in a thickly belted coat with hands in his pockets, reworks the well-known photo of the Spanish artist taken in his Parisian studio in 1944. Surrounded both by a wood stove that was inoperable during wart.mes and canvases illustrating his distinct visual vernacular, the image attests to the persistence of artistic genius. Although Picasso’s 1937 canvas Guernica is hailed as the greatest and most powerful anti-war painting in history for its wrenching rumination on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy’s bombings of the Basque town and its innocent civilians during the Spanish Civil War, the artist’s final visit to Spain took place three years prior to its creation.
The Trip visualizes a fantastical scene in which an aged Picasso finally journeys to Guernica, obliged to fully reckon with the wholly traumatic and horrific impact of the atrocity he depicted decades prior. As Picasso, rendered in deft strokes of oil paint, poses before a visceral wall split asunder by a devastatingly brilliant deluge of periwinkle and gray, the sidewalk disintegrates into fluid churns of ochre and magenta beside his feet. The subject’s eyes, deep-set in a face articulated with heady swathes of paint, comprise ovals of spilling, bloody crimson.
Ablaze in visceral hues of crimson, turquoise and lavender tones, the flaming pearlescent sky of The Trip evidences the rich textural nature of Ghenie’s uniquely integrated material approach to picture making. Demonstrating his post-modern fluency as a painter, the dense and complex surface of The Trip alludes to an array of sources ranging from the chiaroscuro of Renaissance painting to the raw psychological intensity of Francis Bacon’s portraiture to the deft chromatic squeegeed manipulations of the painted surface in Gerhard Richter’s practice that simultaneously create and shatter illusory space. Key to his acclaimed pictorial practice is the application of oil paint via a palette knife instead of a traditional paintbrush. In the present work, the melee of crisply ridged tracts and insolent smatterings of paint coalesce into a sumptuous, electrified surface that evokes the psychological intensity of witnessing the ruins of atrocity. Equally, these variegated sweeps and scrapes reveal an empty space of solitude that speaks to the frailty of recollects ion, and the transience and inadequacies of mortal existence.
Influenced by both his youth spent in thrall to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romanian communist regime and the fraught history of the city in which he currently works and resides, Berlin, Ghenie metaphorically explores themes of malevolence, totalitarianism, dictatorship, and the volatility of human nature that permeate the present from troubling events of recent history. As the artist explains, “We inevitably live in a post-WWII epoch, which means that we constantly have to look back to that watershed moment in order to understand our present condition” (the artist quoted in: Magda Radu, Adrian Ghenie: Rise & Fall, op. cit., p. 49). Also inspired by cinema’s mediation of truth and illusion, as explored by filmmakers including Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, Ghenie’s hallmark artistic style oscillates between realism and the artifice of representation.
The Trip exemplifies Ghenie’s interest in the darkest parts of the twentieth century and his project of problematizing such events through a painterly transfiguration of space and t.mes . Through the potent erasure, effacing and overpainting visible in the present work, Ghenie reminds us that the profound trauma and humiliation of recent history lingers in the space between reality and personal memory, fact and fiction. In particular, the present work typifies his recurring transmutation of recognizable forms of historical figures in his canvases, presenting an exceptional amalgam of the historical and surreal. A recurring and powerful subject in Ghenie’s oeuvre, The Trip references the purging of “degenerate art” from public institutions and collects ions across Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. The source image of the present work cites the hardship Picasso endured throughout World War II and under the Nazi occupation of France, a period during which his many of his works were seized and destroyed. As Guernica’s seething condemnation of Nazism solidified Picasso’s status as an enemy of the regime, The Trip viscerally haunts in its overt and enduring reverberations of violence, repression, and resistance. An extraordinary composite of the historical and the personal, the real and the imagined, the ancient and the contemporary, such resonating elements are exulted in The Trip. The present overlapping strata of pigment form a compelling allegory for the layers of temporality, perception and reality that accumulate over t.mes , spilling over one another ad infinitum. Vibrant and resplendent, the present work evidences Adrian Ghenie’s wielding of the infinite possibilities of oil paint in order to engage in a rigorous dialogue with both art and political history, ultimately forging a trans-historical mode of visualizing the world.
