Eberhard Havekost
Anton Kern Gallery, New York, USA
Because Eberhard Havekost’s paintings sometimes depict faceless modernist buildings, they have been credited with reflecting disillusionment with utopian ideals – but they’re just as likely to evoke interstitial moments in sleek action films, the vacant glamour of Alex Katz portraits, or the random absurdity of advertising images and personal snapshots. These days Havekost usually works from photographs, sometimes digitally manipulated, he has taken himself, though video stills and found images sometimes appear. The new works in ‘Zensur’ (Censorship) feature all of his trademarks: unnatural lighting, cropping, flattened pictorial space and luminous layering of paint, but a new chill has leaked into the imagery, one that has something to do with the tone of public discourse in the U.S. in recent years.
The images are charged yet kept at a wary distance. Several knockout pieces in a creepily neutral palette of shadowy blues and flat, industrial greys succinctly address the show’s theme of self-censorship. A wall, confronted head-on, is decorated with an abstracted (stripe- and starless) American flag and indistinct forms, which in some paintings have been partially blocked out with black or grey rectangles. The three works titled ‘Dunkel Modellwelt’ (Dark Model World, all works 2007) depict unpeopled interiors of destroyed or derelict buildings – a chilling netherworld – while in Kunstliches Licht, Fernsehlicht, B07 (Artificial Light TV Light, B07), a television in an eerily lit room broadcasts silvery smears. Other works simply show scattered tarpaulins or emergency blankets.
That shadows lurk behind the cool-as-sleet surfaces is confirmed in a pair of canvases of the same Jack O’Lantern, one with a white interior beyond its leering eyes and smile, the other a dark one – as if anticipating shifting perceptions. But Erscheinung, B07 (Appearance, B07) and Geist 4, B07 (Spirit 4, B07), lush paintings of young men in hooded sweatshirts, are more difficult to parse. In the past Havekost has rendered faces obscured by curtains of hair, hoods or pulled-down caps, and eyes covered by shadows or black bars to provocative effect. Alongside such emblems of mute anxiety as flags, emergency blankets and unidentifiable sites of devastation, the crowd of men with hidden faces in Erscheinung, B07 and the hooded subject of Geist 4, B07 (who pulls his lower eyelid down in a cautious gesture) may seem to merely underline a general sense of veiled threat. Yet, as the titles suggest, something subtler is intended, and ‘Zensur’ memorably evokes pervasive alienation.
Kristin M. Jones
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