Robert Longo’s last show in New York, “Children of Nyx” (2007), comprised a series of sleeping infants rendered in charcoal. Circling the room, the viewer tip-toed as if in a nursery, afraid to disturb the quietude. Longo’s newest show, which opened at Metro Pictures last Thursday, is not so intimate: instead of dreaming children we have grand cathedrals and grim jumbo jets. It is Longo’s ability to render these scenes in dreamlike chiaroscuro that makes the show meditative rather than mundane. Once again the viewer may find himself speaking in hushed tones.
Like Longo’s previous work, the charcoal drawings in “Surrendering the Absolutes” are grand studies of light and shadow. This time the subjects are more airy: the show’s centerpiece, Untitled (Cathedral of Light), 2008, is the interior of a church composed on five big paper panels. Light floods through tremendous windows, cutting across walls and illuminating a seated congregation, faces made coldly luminous. There is nothing ecstatic about this scene: one feels only the light’s presence and absence, a dynamic that conveys much about the room’s dimensions, but little about the souls of the flock.
Longo seems eager to show us that light obscures as much as it illuminates. The four guitar players onstage in Untitled (The Sound of Speed and Light), 2009, should be the objects of our focus—instead, they are engulfed in a cloud of light, hidden by the very stuff that makes them visible. Likewise, it is impossible to determine whether the figure in Untitled (Et In Arcadia Ego), 2009, travels by night or day; the image is so saturated with white that we’re unsure whether we’re looking at sunlit quanta or moonlit fog.
The show includes one sculpture, a twelve-foot-tall black obelisk. Its sides are opaque and shiny, like enormous LCD screens, and from certain vantage points the viewer thinks he may see in them more than his own anamorphic reflection. Again, obfuscation and revelation are paired, and we may not have one without having the other. What’s clear is that Longo is a fine artist, a man in possession of great technical skill. When so much art today is wrought from a rejection of formal precision, it is refreshing to find a collection of work that you not only like, but actually admire.
