Michael St. John's "The Passions" at De Boer

The historian Robert Hobbs sought to illuminate St. John’s recent show at De Boer in Los Angeles by way of Barthes' notion of punctum, according to which the kineticism of the pictures originates in the intermedial slippage of identity. In other words, for Hobbs, the quality of the works resides in its authenticity, which is determined by the extant remainder of the actor’s presence in the final painting. Hobbs writes: 

…rather than revealing his sitters’ emotions—a process that would reify and render them opaque — St. John’s works from The Passions series offer viewers different routes for participating in the deconstruction of their mass-media cinematic figures…

But the paintings’ true value resides in mediation as a process of transformation: in their voracity, boldness, and tact in transforming the original film stills. The task that St. John set up for himself in this series was to work through his relationship to particular images, images which suggested to him an aesthetic possibility beyond their ready-made existence. Hobbs’ desire to enlist these pictures as entries for mass media deconstruction neglects the objectified subjectivity in the paintings. It allows him to sidestep any discussion of their quality as artworks. It strips them of the only thing that sets them apart from the originals.

As Hobbs notes, all the works are painted in grisaille (which unites the series), and each contains a variety of painting styles, from thin and gaseous whirs to thick, blocky, truncated strokes, which set up a distance of the paintings to the original stills. St. John’s arena is fundamentally painterly. It involves the range of light and dark, the attitude of the application of paint, the juxtaposition or blending of contrasting textures, and the occasional exaggeration of source material. All of these elements are refracted by St. John from the spirit of the original photograph.

Margot Tenenbaum, 2021 oil on canvas. 30 x 24 in.

Margot Tenenbaum is captured at a moment of glassy satisfaction. Her closed eyes, slightly upturned lip, and slightly tilted head all disclosing a sense of imperturbable pleasure. Against a background of vapor she is lost in a dream, gliding along on some concealed fantasy. Perhaps she is dreaming of us, as we dream of her. Perhaps she is dreaming of herself. Her face is the only solid object. There is a thinness of paint in certain areas, especially the hair and jacket, which help to bring out the gravity of her face. The shape of her hair is rendered as though made of paper, but the paint is applied with such lightness that it is liable to evaporate. The hair’s simultaneous qualities of thinness, sharpness, jaggedness, and its brushed-through texture all lend to its dissimilitude against the rest of the picture. Her coat is dissolving, stirring into a cloud. It is as effervescent as the background and pronounces itself only by the difference in shade. Here St John’s technical skill is in the service of an end beyond the initial image. He’s created a new world for the subject, given her a second life.

As Margot Tenenbaum dreams, Roslyn Taber suffers a nightmare. Her face and hair are ground into mesh geometry. Hot white light emanating from the scowl of her eyebrows obliterates the background into a flash, which threatens to consume her. The paint is blocky all around, set down in broad strokes with sharp angles. Her mouth is silently ajar, eyes closed. This is not St. John’s best display of technical virtuosity in the show. There is some slight muddling of shape in a few places and an overall less persuasive handling of shade. But, despite these short-comings, it has a forceful effect. The picture’s seduction is shrouded in agony, the alluring Americana goddess par excellence is shot through with anxiety and fear.

Roslyn Taber, 2021 oil on canvas. 30 x 24 in.

Some of the paintings in the show lack inspiration. In the good ones, St. John was able to subject his skill to an internal vision. He possessed his formal methods with enough dexterity and sensitivity to give each pictorial element its due, and set it off against all the other elements in service of underlying aesthetic force. In Arthur Fleck, this dexterity is blunted and becomes a crutch. One moves from the uncouth patches of the jacket, to the glossy and soft-shaded facial contours, to the stern and imposing appendages of makeup over the eyes and mouth, rendered with a heavy hand and thick brush, with a sense that what was once an asset for St. John has become a liability. The techniques have been dislodged from the picture's inner logic and have become pleasantries. Arthur Fleck pronounces the rupture more directly than a work like Precious which suffers from a similar problem. But it may be the very pronunciation of this rupture that provides the key to the better works of the show.

Arthur Fleck, 2021 oil on canvas. 30 x 24 in.