revieWs woLFe LenkiewicZ
Wolfe lenkieWicz:
nu-trinity
Joe La PLaca in
coLLabor ation with
Dickinson, LonDon
10–30 october
Mythological phylogenies disrupted
by mitotic juxtapositions give birth to a
rorty riot of transtemporal iconography,
violently violating one’s sense of coherent
morphologies and rational narratives. The
space–time continuum of history and art are
rent by carefully grafted icons from aeons
apart. A naked sylph senses a centaured
Marilyn Monroe’s special scent of success
and failure; they ride through an ontological
soup of being and almost nothingness;
she, holding the head of John the Baptist
– or is that President Kennedy? The Golden
Fleece trails like the sloughed-off skin of an
airborne écorché, the whole agglutinated,
dedifferentiated mass slipping slowly into a
dysplasia of reconfiguration.
Would you believe it? Adam and Eve, on an archaic oil rig, tree sprouting, turn back to see those
nu-trinity, 2007, copper beech pencil on
paper mounted onto canvas, 340 x 520 cm
Twin Towers, smouldering and smoking like 1930s funnels on the sinking steamship of a hypercapitalist
state, beginning a voyage to the realisation of its own vulnerability, to the island of its broken dream of
omnipotence. Red chalk rendering on fine paper lends the images a notional connection to the official
canon of fine art (the Old Master drawing, towing its cargo of value like an aesthetic tugboat), but when
married to the jarring image of raw industrial geo-exploitation, it brings a hallucinatory rupture into play, as
if a black hole had opened up between two different and disparate universes, and all the chaos of political
psychosis is about to burst through.
Despite the apparently conservative timbre of Wolfe Lenkiewicz’s practice, his drawings – whether
the ‘grand machines’ of nu-trinity (all work 2007) and Marilyn Centaur or the delicately inflected red chalk
drawings which could be from a parallel-universe Renaissance or Baroque folio – are full of anarchy, irony
and revolution. Although the small-scale drawings, such as Princess Diana Under the Royal State Carriage
and Angel of the North Tower – which shows a Renaissance angel atop the burning World Trade Center
– display a strong resonance with Max Ernst’s surrealist collages, one should not be too quick to deduce
surrealistic, allegorical or metaphorical concerns in the work. It is evident that sometimes the artist makes
his radical juxtapositions and disruptions in order to see what the effect might be, both on each element
by the other’s presence and on the viewer by the rupture of their usual sense of ennui in the face of
overworn clichés and iconic images.
Lenkiewicz transposes the notion of the emblem, whether alchemical, religious, allegorical
or ornamental, from its original context in the history of Western art as an instructional motif into a
contemporary universe of fragile and flawed celebrities, injecting hitherto exhausted events and icons
with new emotional energy. Elvis, Darth Vader and Christ pose as the new Trinity, in the manner of the
iconic still from the film shot by Sgt William H Genaust of the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima in 1945.
Lenkiewicz’s work is not so much a critique of contemporary American expansionism, celebrity culture or
the commodification of desire as an iconographic investigation into the power inherent in certain images
and events, and the mythos associated with them. Richard Dyer
113 ArtrevieW
JAN_REVIEWS.indd 113 4/12/07 15:27:08
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