Daniel Bodner
Daniel Bodner’s paintings capture “the unbridgeable gap between people,” critic Wim van der Beek wrote in 1994. But Jürgen Kisters saw a “story of love, of tenderness” in a 1999 show while the Tribune’s Alan Artner found in the same exhibit a “somber existential atmosphere.” Bodner himself has written that his work questions whether the artist must create “a new space” in order to include the figure. A similar range of responses is likely to Bodner’s 20 paintings now at Roy Boyd. His rough-hewn figures with indistinct faces occupy such vaguely outlined settings that they could be almost anyone anywhere. Most are nude and either male or of indeterminate gender, which adds to the sense that their identities have been stripped away.
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Yet these hovering figures have an almost spooky power, made more resonant by Bodner’s intentional ambiguity: the figures have the look of posed photos, yet the surfaces convey both painterly effects and natural disintegration. Bodner usually applies his paint with a spackling knife, then scrapes it away in order to evoke “processes such as mold, oxidization and decay,” he writes. A monochrome look and off-whites suggest decaying photographs and give the figures an otherworldly aura. Together his backgrounds and figures have a startling luminosity, perhaps associated with the northern light of Amsterdam, where Bodner has lived since 1990. “All those grays and washed-out tones,” he says. “And the land is concave and the sky seems to come right down to meet it.” In DB 16 one of the figures is painted so transparently that the lines of the water and shore behind him can be seen through his body, suggesting a pentimento effect and making the figure even more ghostly.
Though von Gloeden set up his compositions quite formally, many of the poses Bodner chooses have a look unique to photographs: the subject is caught in a random moment, head twisted to the side, one foot placed tentatively before the other. By creating several sets of ambiguities–are his figures posed or unposed, captured photographically or in paint?–Bodner throws the question of interpretation back on the viewer, reminding each of us of our own uniqueness and hence separateness from others.
Watt thinks printmaking is the perfect medium for depicting life today because “a huge percentage of the visual information we get…is printed matter.” But rather than simply repeating, or even amplifying, the assaultive flatness of a mass-culture artifact, Watt finds luminous beauty in each. In the linocut Receipt (which is not part of “Legacy Suite”), he blows up a store receipt to 46 inches high, so that the lines and smudges around the numbers begin to seem monumentalized halos, implicitly arguing that the visual details of things we normally overlook are of interest in themselves.
