Dubnau

Jenny Dubnau: Head On

January 30 to June 5, 2011

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

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Jenny Dubnau: Head On

Jenny Dubnau’s series of portraits for her exhibition at The Aldrich includes artists Shimon Attie, James Esber, Thilo Hoffmann, herself, and some Museum staff mem-bers. All the artists represented are currently exhibiting their work at the Museum during this semester in which the work on view relates to the theme of Portraiture. The selection of sitters (the artists) was intended to function as a mirror reflecting back upon those whose own projects focus on portraiture. This enables them to examine their own feelings when the gaze is turned on them, in this case by Dubnau, an art-ist who does not choose the model’s most flattering aspect to capture in her realist oil paintings.

Dubnau’s straightforward paintings are typical and traditional portraits as we know them. However, they can also function as anti-portraits, because instead of choosing the most complimentary pose and facial expression—one that would glorify the sitter in perpetuity, as in traditional portraiture—Dubnau captures the fleeting moment of an involuntary expression. In addition, she finds physical imperfections, such as signs of aging, to be compelling instances of vulnerability, and focuses on them in detail. Not surprisingly, she keeps a reminder, in the form of a piece of paper tacked to her studio wall, of the “good things about realism”: “Toughness, lack of sentimentality and courage of facing reality: POLITICAL.” To this, Dubnau adds: “I think realism is political by nature because it does not idealize or obscure the truth: it’s harder to avoid the political nature of things if their edges are not being ‘softened.’”

Dubnau’s work is also political in the sense that realist painting in today’s contem-porary art world is often considered a style which has lost its relevance. However, in her mind resorting to an unapologetically unsentimental and descriptive language is relevant to our time. “You are capturing something about the way people really look by not idealizing features, because this is not a vanity project. I paint them as they ex-ist and reflect their own realities and concerns. I can see a lot of anxiety in their faces and it may be my own projection, but I am constantly thinking about global warming, the war in Iraq, the wrecked economy. I like to think that anxieties such as these are reflected in the faces of my subjects. And I think that we today do look different than the faces of the people of the fourteenth century precisely because of these issues. I like painting individuals in all their particularity: the idea is that they could have only been painted at a particular historical moment. I think that the zeitgeist is reflected in people’s faces in realist painting.”

We can venture then, that facing reality head on, devoid of idealization, becomes Dubnau’s policy-making. Her defiance of the idealization of subjects that is found in traditional portraiture is her agenda for defending freedom of (visual) speech. She aims at collaps-ing the bridge between the sitter and the painting—her own mediation and interpre-tation—by using a realist language and just painting what is in front of her; but this has its tricks, as we will see. Nonetheless, her portraits want to be a direct passage to

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reality, an objective also attempted by Alice Neel, an artist that Dubnau admires. “I told the truth as I perceived it,” explained Neel, “I was always much more truthful and courageous on canvas.”

Dubnau’s portraits, like those of Neel, are her “ticket to reality,” but a reality that goes beyond appearances. By identifying, or not, with her subjects, she understands the particularities of a sitter and also the culture around him or her. The portraits inhabit a blurry boundary between individuality (the subject) and universality (humanity and its cultural milieu/zeitgeist). The paintings deal with individuality as they present the specificity of the subject—we can immediately recognize the individual who posed for the portrait and also recognize his or her particular gesture; but we also wonder if Dubnau was able to capture their essence. Yet, if we do not know the sitter—which is usually the case, since the artist generally portrays her circle of friends—we wonder if the image in the portrait looks like the real person and if it conveys hints of their true personality. Are those traits unique to this person? Would we recognize this per-son if he or she were walking down the street? Would they react as we envision they would? Do we get to know them through these works? The portraits then seem less straightforward and direct, as they unfold in different layers dependent on our own perception of them.

All these questions remind me of an exercise I do when a high-profile criminal’s photo is shown on TV: would I recognize evil intentions just by simply looking at that face? I always try to figure people out by looking at them, especially in airports, where I can wait for hours as long as I can observe people and try to guess what country they come from, what language they speak, and if they are traveling for business or pleasure. It really does not matter if I get it right; it is the pleasure of reading features, body lan-guages, and attire that fascinates me. There is nothing more mysterious than trying to understand what makes us human, all alike and different at the same time; what brings us all together and what makes us unique.

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Similarly, Dubnau admits to not being interested solely in capturing the essence of that one person and she does not believe that a realist portrait is ultimately about the real person. So she is not simply painting what is in front of her. She is interested in the exercise of how we look at people and how close she can get to depicting that person’s likeness. “When I paint my father, to a certain degree it is him, but primarily it’s a paint-ing about all of my projections, and an idea of a man in his seventies who lives in the twenty-first century. It is a notion of a character, a metaphor for someone rather than making it about my father. I’m borrowing his image: it clearly looks like him, but it’s not really him, the painting is not about him per se,” she explains. Asking questions such as: How can we really know someone? What can we read from their face? What do their gestures and they way they are dressed tell us? What can we read from their surface and does it really reflect their interior life? For Dubnau, these questions are truly at the root of her paintings.

And the portraits are daunting, because there are no straightforward answers to Dub-nau’s questions. This is precisely their drama, and also ours, in our current and ev-eryday lives. We spend our lives trying to understand people, we are constantly figur-ing ourselves out and wondering if our interiors match our exteriors—questioning if they should, and perhaps even attempting to control this relationship. Dubnau’s work brings all these questions to the forefront and confronts us with them.

Her portraits are physically very present. They appear to be engaging us, the view-er. They are accessible, even if several are somewhat aggressive; some are shy, others vaguely familiar, perhaps even cocky. These subjects are not passive: they are either

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staring directly out or apparently reacting to the viewer. They are not loud, yet they are intense. They have a similar appearance, and by that I mean they have a style; one could recognize a Dubnau portrait even if the sitter is unknown and we had never previously seen the painting.

As a group, Dubnau’s portraits and their gathering of disparate gestures represent the universality of human nuances. Tapping into a wide range of facial expressions, she pinpoints humanity in all of us. Do all these portraits together present an image of the human character today? Do we look better or worse than those images of men and women who came before us? How will we look to people in the future? Paul Tillich in his 1959 text Each Period Has Its Peculiar Image of Man expressed these and other concerns. He affirms that once in a while a new image of man pushes towards the sur-face and finds its way to artists and philosophers, and that once these images emerge we wonder what has become of us: are we better or are we losing our humanity? (That is a good question these days, when the U.S is still engaged in the longest war in its history.) Tillich seems to agree with Dubnau about the need to depict as honestly as possible, because when that is done, even if what is portrayed is the negative side of the human character, the image itself will depict the fight for humanity. “To grasp the negativity of the content by the positivity of the form, is a triumph of humanity,” he explains. The forms, as in these portraits, are our mirrors, our collective conscience: the point of convergence of the physical and the character of our times.

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Dubnau often wonders what it means to the sitters to have their portrait rendered and what it means to others that know them. Regarding Dubnau’s portrait of me, my mother alluded to the famous “This is not a pipe” quote and painting by Magritte, commenting “This is not my child,” and in that context, she is right. Another of her sitters, M.B., explained: “The process of getting this portrait done felt honorable. I am not used to the attention, so the fact that she was taking the time to create this painting and thinking about my image with care and attention was fascinating to me. I was nervous, it will be the first time I see myself in paint, but I am looking forward to knowing how someone else, who does not know me, sees me. You do not often learn how people see you. It is interesting because I will get to understand how strangers in the streets view me, and on the other hand, it is a strange feeling to know that during the time that it takes her to create this painting she is living with me, with my image. I wonder what will happen with this painting, where it will end up!”

It will end up in a place that appreciates the depiction of humanity with all its positive and negative traits, which values a portrayal that has the ability to touch others, as is achieved in Dubnau’s work. In her attempt to represent humanity, she presents unlim-ited possibilities of expression that we all recognize and share. This recognition of each other is ultimately what provides us with a sense of being, of purpose, of consistency and confidence. We are who we are, and Dubnau reaffirms us in that ineffable truth.

Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, curator

1. Jenny Dubnau in conversation with the author, November 17, 2010.2. Alice Neel, “Art as a Form of History: Interview with Patricia Hills” (1983), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 215.3. Paul Tillich, “Each Period Has Its Peculiar Image of Man” (1959), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sour-cebook of Artists’ Writings, Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., (Berkeley, Los Angeles: London University of California Press, 1996), p. 183.4. Tillich, p. 182.

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