Painting as Witness

On the work of Robert Cleworth, for his exhibition: A COMPRESSION OF TIME: GOOD AND BAD IMAGES

Chelsea Lehmann

Throughout history, the patriarchal power structures of society have granted men dominant positions in areas like politics, social privilege, moral authority, and property control. This power dynamic has also been reflected in the world of art. In his exhibition, A Compression of Time: Good and Bad Images, Robert Cleworth examines the relationship between painting and the patriarchy by using the materiality of paint—historically used to consecrate masculine power - to challenge it instead.

Drawing on the art historical canon, Cleworth references the past to address the present, a time where the ‘me too’ movement aims to confront toxic masculinity amidst the context of neoliberal capitalism, which further amplifies the inequality created by patriarchal structures of oppression. In response to these prevailing conditions and power imbalances, Cleworth opts to incorporate images from historical paintings such as Bouguereau’s The Flagellation of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1880), combining them with contemporary media sources in his works. For instance, he uses an image of convicted murderer Robert Durst, who, according to a psychiatrist's report, suffered from ‘personality decomposition’ during childhood, which serves as a fitting metaphor for the context in which he is portrayed in Cleworth's Atomiser paintings. Here, Durst is depicted as an elderly man with a shrunken, floating head, savagely abridged by an encroaching abstract void. With his technically virtuosic painting approach that blends realistic renderings with gestural abstraction, Cleworth subverts the original meanings of the ‘master’ paintings he quotes from. He achieves this by introducing visual elements like grids, overpainting, and fields of colour, which serve to ‘democratise’ the picture plane, giving equal aesthetic significance to the processes and pentimenti of painting alongside traditional techniques that prioritise the illusion of form. By revealing the conceits of pictorial space, Cleworth’s approach doesn't just modify the ‘good and bad images’ he combines, it enhances them, both materially and conceptually.

As a contemporary genre, figurative painting is encumbered by the sheer volume and intractability of historicised representations of human life and bodies. It is constantly challenged by and conscripted into ideologies around identity, morality, power, and politics. Reflecting this idea, Cleworth says, “My methods, techniques and imagery come from the conflicted relationship I have with the very practice of painting.” The impulse to ‘break’ images and recontextualise them, can, however “function as a mechanism of historical innovation by destroying old values and introducing new ones in their place.” Drawing inspiration from Baroque and academic styles that evoke binaries such as “reflection and emotion, pain and lust, devoutness and voluptuousness,” Cleworth delves into this concept by utilising the interplay of destruction and creation within his work.

Through his paintings, Cleworth bears witness to the ever-shifting definitions of masculinity in the modern era. He says, “In some ways, these paintings are an ironic dedication to the male ego. And to my love of painting,” underscoring how irony and sincerity are not always mutually exclusive. By utilising the emotive power of painting and the blunt economy of erasure, Cleworth emphasises how new insights can emerge from the reinterpretation of images, all the while upholding the rich traditions of figurative art.

- Chelsea Lehmann, 2023.

C. Lehmann, ‘The Articulate Surface: Painting and the Latent Image,’ PhD dissertation, UNSW Art & Design, 2019, p. 42.

B. Groys, ‘Iconoclasm as an artistic device: Iconoclastic Strategies in Film’, Art Power, Cambridge, London, MIT Press, 2008, p. 68.

E. Panofsky, ‘What is Baroque?’, in Three Essays on Style, (ed.) I. Lavin, MIT Press, 1997, p. 75.

Atomiser - after Bouguereau

Oil, spray paint, pencil and chalk and canvas

196.5 x 148.5 cm.

O B E R T C L E W O R T H