They bloom improbably on a sandbar in the North Atlantic. A tropical inheritance of hot pink makes Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, sometimes called China rose, as exuberant as the men who cultivate the flowers in the Fire Island Pines, where Doron Langberg first painted them. Shocking amongst the native pitch pines and red maples, assaulted by salty air, they require constant care. That may be what drew Langberg to them during a visit to a friend’s seaside home where, for much of last summer, the artist relocated his New York studio. He had been working on the portraits of friends and lovers for which he is best known: paintings, begun en plein air on dunes or in evergreen copses, that render gay men’s bodies, entwined in repose, in oils so diffused by turpentine that their love exudes a sense of organic symbiosis. Serenity washes over them with a warm, beachy light. But like an invasive bud, their queer flourishing is a hard-won, rather than natural, fact. Here and there, white-primed canvas bares itself through brushstrokes that seem breathed-on or left behind by a breeze, as if to signal that the intensity of any pleasure foregrounds its evanescence. Sex, the ‘little death,’ is over just as soon as it’s begun.
The first still life painters understood this. In seventeenth-century Holland, fresh cut flowers – reproductive organs of the plant kingdom – were depicted in vases and on tables, in various states of freshness and decay, to signify that life is never truly still. Painting arrests the passage of time by embalming it in a liquid medium. See how every leaf and petal in Langberg’s Hibiscus 2 seems to sway in the wind, while wet flecks of green in the painting’s upper registers, applied with a spray bottle, vibrate with quiet intensity. This is a perfect moment that only the artist can preserve for us. Magnified at a scale larger than nearly any floral study in the history of art, Langberg’s work turns the movements of nature into a grand drama, and makes us bees.
Langberg’s work turns the movements of nature into a grand drama, and makes us bees.
Before the flowers, there were fleshier organs, cropped from personal photographs or video stills: tongues or cocks entering asses. (In many of Langberg’s paintings, the rectum is a punctum around which the composition is organized.) These too are nature studies, moments of pollination full of heat and motion, which Langberg achieves with dense strokes of radiant color. In Lovers 1 and 2, these scenes are again blown up to the size of a grand landscape painting or royal portrait, insisting that gay sex be given the art-historical respect it deserves. On each large canvas, wet pigments commingle like bodily fluids. Penetration mirrors the voyeuristic intrusion of our gaze. If these works formally recall Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde, 1866, they also embrace a fleeting jouissance with no future beyond itself – not a beginning but an end to the reproduction of value under capitalism. A rosebud by any name is content to smell sweet.
Lately, Langberg has been studying the landscapes of Auguste Renoir. ‘The way Renoir uses chroma is so physical, it’s almost sweaty. It’s an embodied experience of a landscape,’ he notes. The sheer corpulence of vegetation in the Impressionist master’s paintings seems to imply the presence of his fleshy figures, who in other works idle under the shade of swaying trees. Brushwork moves in all directions, as it does in Langberg’s Hibiscus 1 and 2. You can almost hear a susurrus through the leaves.
In a way, Langberg has always been a painter of landscapes. The human body is the first landscape we encounter in utero, and to which we return as sexual beings. In his paintings, the edges of bodies bleed into a light which, paradoxically, gives them radiant visibility; his sitters are luminously contingent forms. See, for instance, the couple in Lovers at Night, reclined in bed, with their emerald legs applied in long, wet strokes as if, like Apollo and Daphne, they are becoming trees. Their contours emerge almost effortlessly from abstract gestures that call up Joan Mitchell as readily as they do Gerhard Richter. Above them, a wide, gauzy ribbon of purplish-green, which Langberg produced by spraying diluted oil paint and smearing it with a squeegee, could be a curtain or a darkening sky.
An unsteady phenomenology of inside and outside, open and closed, positions these works in a kind of dream-state. Painting from direct, intimate encounters, Langberg renders such distinctions hazy, as if, in an ecstatic trance, the walls of a lover’s bedroom could suddenly melt away. ‘Making a portrait painting is a search for some kind of interiority,’ he says. ‘Through revision, you are searching for deeper meaning.’ Moments of rest offer a view of the unconscious, unguarded and exposed for the world to see. And yet, Langberg’s fluid strokes give even these moments of stillness a sense of transience. Everything is always in motion. The self is a continuum of change.
‘The image of the body,’ Jacques Lacan observed, ‘is like the imaginary vase which contains the bouquet of real flowers.’ He was referring to the mirror stage, the process by which, as infants, we come to recognize ourselves. The vessel of representation contains truth in its fabulations: the emotional ebb of romance evoked by a warming spectrum, or a sense of interdependency in the porousness of two figures who appear to become one. Langberg depicts these fleeting moments for us so that we may return to them as revelations: paint spreads, a flower opens, a body shares its secrets.
Evan Moffitt, 2023
Images:
Lovers at Night (detail), 2023, 80 × 96 in | 243.8 × 203.2 cm
Hibiscus 2, 2022, oil on linen, 96 × 80 in | 243.8 × 203.2 cm
Lovers 1, 2022, oil on linen, 96 × 80 in | 243.8 × 203.2 cm
All works © Doron Langberg, courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro