Marlene Dumas

Hamburg, Produzentengalerie, Land of Milk and Honey, April - May 1993, illustrated in color
Bonn, Kunstverein, Survive, December 1993 - February 1994, p. 73, illustrated in color

Marlene Dumas’ The Messengers is an outstanding polyptych, executed in 1993, which powerfully displays the artist’s extraordinary talents as a painter, reflecting her unique ability to arrest powerful emotions within her viewer from the nexus between her subject matter and her dazzling technical prowess. Four separate canvases come together to narrate a tale of ‘The Messengers’. There is no fixed meaning here; the painting’s genesis does not come from a specific text. Dumas’ presentation revels in the loose, elastic fluidity of meanings provided to us by the generic faerie tale, whilst remaining firstly, and finally, framed as visual references. As Matthias Winzen has suggested, Dumas’ paintings blossom where language ceases to provide adequate means of understanding or interpreting feelings. Dumas’ Messengers encircle the same subtexts one finds in the Brothers Grimm’s works, for example, or Nordic folktales. Explicit of nothing, yet implicit of a wide range of meanings, three dark skeletons, framed against narrow portals lit with an eerie incandescence, bring a small, ambiguously described gift for a three-year old girl, who stridently confronts the viewer with the same stature, size and mien as the skeletal Messengers.

Anathema to Dumas’ painted universe, yet central to the structure of most faerie tales, is the concept of innocence and, in most cases, its loss felt by a young individual. As Anna Tilroe writes, “Innocence does not seem to exist in her world view … Even the babies she draws and paints fail to evoke the least impression of innocence”. (Anna Tilroe, “The Unfulfillment and the Surfeit”, Parkett, vol. 38, Zurich 1993, p. 94). The young child, the recipient of the gifts from the ethereal skeletons, does not display any ‘immaculate purity’ that Tilroe associates with innocence. Rather, this infant exhibits a certain level of experience, which one reads physically on the child: her confrontational mien; the fact she stands nearly six feet tall, mirroring the size of the skeletons; the fact her body, executed by bold, loose, economic strokes of the brush, embraces the fragmentary, the imperfect, all layer this figure with an experiential dynamic. Tilroe notes that, rather than vehicles for interpretations of innocence, Dumas’ children become paragons of “… ignorance, nakedness and vulnerability [that] are primarily a body. A body that in its terrifyingly tender youth leaves no illusion about its end.” (Ibid., p. 97)

Although not produced by single gestures, Dumas’ painting here seems to arrive at its Image as though color, pigment and medium have landed all at once and then coalesced together into unexpected configurations. Thus, an immediacy of feeling exists: the skeletons, especially, betray sharp bodily utterances such as gasps, exclamations or shudders. As Johanna Burton notes, “Dumas asks us to re-see her subjects by magnifying them and abstracting them, by disregarding natural proportions and discarding the comforts of context. As she literally zooms in on her subjects, she makes manifest a perversion or twisting of received social knowledge, a tactical corruption or misinterpretation of meaning.” (See www.newmuseum.org/more_exh_m_dumas.php). Some passages of paint here, however, are surprisingly thick; the skeletons’ heads, for example, have a heavy, greasy delineation, which distinguishes them from the dryer passages of looser paint forming, for example, the cluster of young girls one finds at the second skeleton’s legs. This locks their Image onto the canvas, making these dark sentinels and harbingers from ‘the other realm’ from whence they came just that little bit darker.

Dumas’ form of expressionism seems to continue the concept of painting begun by Edvard Munch and furthered by Francis Bacon. An array of strange, unearthly colors makes up the artist’s palette here, engendering the frightening aura of the skeletons and heightening her enquiry into the human body. This also lends her work an innate violence, as was certainly the case with Munch’s and Bacon’s terse aesthetic, and which fuels her passionate take on the praxis and lexis of painting. As Marina Warner notes, “… the daubs and streaks of the paint, the irresolution of color in the skin tones seem to struggle to put some distance of abhorrence between herself and the livid flesh.” (Marina Warner, “Marlene Dumas: In The Charnel House of Love”, Ibid., p. 76).