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The Missing

In January, 2007, Pierre Dorion returned from a pilgrimage he made to the Hamburger Kunsthalle—pilgrimage being the operative word. He travelled to Hamburg for one reason only: to take in a once-in-a-lifetime retrospective exhibition of works by Caspar David Friedrich, whose early-19th-century Romantic paintings Dorion reveres. Curious, then, that Dorion says he’s been “trying for years not to be a romantic.” In declaring his anti-romanticism, Dorion implicitly acknowledges the romantic in him. Since the mid-1990s, he has been making meticulous, photo-realistic paintings of places and things: domestic interiors, nightclub interiors, parks, park benches, storefronts whose windows hinder rather than assist vision, holes in walls, etc. What these paintings have in common is the absence of people within them; that, and the fact that they’re all based on photographs—mostly snapshots that Dorion has been taking wherever he goes since 1994.

It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Dorion’s studio contains more snapshots than anything else. Four-by-sixinch colour prints cover walls and work tables in loose grids that appear to be organized according to formal and thematic congruences and complementarities. Dorion looks for certain formal dynamics in the world and shoots them when they catch his eye, just as he scans the world he inhabits for found representations of modernist abstraction. Thus, when he sees a wall with holes in it, he thinks of Lucio Fontana’s punctured monochromatic paintings of the 1950s and 1960s (snapshots of such walls led to Dorion’s paintings Paris, 15 août and Trastevere). Only a few snapshots get to be pinned up on the narrow wall that is adjacent to the far broader one that serves as Dorion’s primary work surface—these are the chosen few that he will project, as colour slides, onto prepared canvases for painting.

Dorion’s remark about repressing his inner romantic is reminiscent of another provocative statement he has made: “J’étais [au départ] en amour avec la peinture et j’essayais de la tuer en même temps.” Translated: “In the beginning I was in love with painting, and at the same time I tried to kill it.” He has withheld from his own works all signs of the romantic spontaneity and tactile expressiveness that many viewers want, and even expect, from the medium. Painting from photographs, Dorion long ago turned away from the romantic tradition as embodied in Abstract Expressionism, Tachisme and Neo-Expressionism. By the same token, his works recognize but don’t capitulate to the proscriptive critical discourse that framed painting between the 1970s and the turn of the millennium. But to say that Dorion is a highly controlled anti-romantic is not to say that his paintings—even at their most controlled and chilly—are devoid of affect; quite the contrary.

In painting Bowring Park, a series of four views of a picturesque park in St. John’s, Newfoundland (two painted in 1999 and two in 2006), Dorion selected notably non-picturesque vistas that are devoid of either human or animal habitation. In Bowring Park IV, the view has been reduced to a single razor-sharp, slightly curved diagonal that ascends from the lower left of the canvas to halfway up the right side, with a pearl-grey sky that graduates almost imperceptibly from pale grey to slightly violet-grey above, and, below, a flat, deep-green area with only the slightest variegation in its upper reaches to signal swelling terrain. Dorion’s process intensifies the sense of desolation that his chosen subjects so often evoke. According to Merriam-Webster Online, “desolate” denotes emptiness, the absence of life—“devoid of inhabitants…” reads the first entry; “joyless, disconsolate, and sorrowful…as if through separation from a loved one” the second. Once he decides which snapshot he intends to paint, Dorion has a professional photographer reshoot the original print using a macro lens, which captures the maximum possible amount of visual information from the original. Nevertheless, the resulting slide takes Dorion one generation further away from his original viewing experience. Such rephotography also subtly heightens contrast and abstracts shapes, but not nearly as much as Dorion does himself while painting the picture. He simplifies forms and eliminates extraneous details such as trees in the background or clouds in the sky. Dorion also premixes all the colours he uses in any given painting, further flattening its shapes and eliminating any potential for (romantic) painterly incident.

In 1999, Dorion based a painting called Plafond (Bruxelles) on a snapshot he took of a bar ceiling in Brussels. The focal point of this picture is arguably a spherical black lens-studded fixture— the normally unseen source of the swirling disco lights that lend a hint of delirium to dancing in otherwise dimly lit clubs. Like the snapshot, the painting shows the light source as it looks in broad daylight, exposed in all its ungainliness amid the torn paper traces of past revelry. In 2002, Dorion revisited the subject of what’s left behind after the party is over in a different, more clearly modish setting; the scene in Ornement II follows a fire in a club on New York’s West 14th Street, and features a mildew-spotted ceiling, an exposed wire leading to a bare bulb and three mid-century- modern, globe-shaped hanging light fixtures that would be the envy of the Cuban-American artist/designer Jorge Pardo.

Plafond (Bruxelles) was one of several paintings that figured in the exhibition that Dorion installed in May, 1999, in a vacant apartment in Les Dauphins sur le parc, a concrete residential tower that overlooks Montreal’s Parc Lafontaine. Entitled “Chambres avec vues,” the exhibition marked a turning point in Dorion’s development.¹ For one thing, it subtly demonstrated his increased responsiveness to the political and cultural life of the late 1980s and 1990s—a period dominated by the deadly combination of the spiralling AIDS crisis and the resurgent conservatism of the Thatcher, Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Mulroney administrations, whose policies amply demonstrated their disregard for the lives of the queers and junkies who were most severely affected by the (at least partially) state-induced health emergency. On a more positive note, the period was also marked by the emergence of a powerful, persuasive, take-no-prisoners brand of queer and AIDS activism in response to the related epidemics of AIDS and homophobic violence.

Dorion traces his inspiration for “Chambres avec vues” to an intimate exhibition by the American artist and AIDS activist Zoe Leonard. During the spring of 1995, Leonard used her Essex Street studio in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to stage an intensely personal—and political—installation. The installation featured a few of Leonard’s signature black-and-white photographs, but its principal raison d’être was a suite of sculptures, each consisting of a piece of fruit that Leonard tore apart and then painstakingly reassembled with needle and thread, buttons or zippers. The fruit sculptures identified Leonard’s project as an act of public grieving for the celebrated American artist maudit David Wojnarowicz, who died at the age of 37 from AIDS-related causes during the summer of 1992.²

“Chambres avec vues,” less specific in its purpose and purview than Leonard’s tribute to Wojnarowicz, offered visitors an opportunity to view a carefully selected group of paintings installed in a domestic interior devoid of any other signs of domestic life. The installation encompassed works in a variety of genres, but included no figure paintings—the figure having been exceedingly rare in Dorion’s oeuvre since 1994. At that time he executed the last in the cycle of heartbreaking photo-based self-portraits that he began in 1990 in response both to the sickness and eventual AIDS-related death of his lover in August, 1991, and to learning in 1987 that he too is HIV-positive.

Upon entering apartment 1112 at Les Dauphins sur le parc, visitors first encountered La Chambre verte, a lush painting whose colours and quality of light are as soft and comforting as the cotton clothing that is simply and lovingly shown hanging from wall hooks and resting on a straight-backed wooden chair alongside a six-pack of water bottles. La Chambre verte suggests rest, comfort and, to this observer, travel; perhaps an intimate, presumably passionate experience in a foreign city that was memorable enough to commemorate in a snapshot.³

Like other works in “Chambres avec vues,” La Chambre verte suggests a dialogue with works by other contemporary artists. During the first half of the 1990s—just prior to the introduction of the highly effective combination drug therapies that are now used to treat people with AIDS—a number of artists used clothes to evoke and honour memories of everyday intimacies. Wolfgang Tillmans shot several memorable photographs on this theme, including one of a semen-stained white T-shirt, neatly folded and alone; another showed a well-worn pair of jeans pulled suggestively over a bulbous newel post. In 1992, the American artist Jim Hodges created an intimate installation entitled What’s Left that consisted entirely of gay-coded items of clothing (black leather shoes, worn Levi’s 501s with silver-studded black leather belt, soiled briefs and a black T-shirt) carefully arranged on the floor as though carelessly left behind by a man who leapt out of them in the heat of passion. The suggested passionate encounter is presented as past through the addition to the arrangement of a fine silver chain-link cobweb.

“Chambres avec vues” can be read as an allegory of life amid loss in the age of AIDS. Dorion was very careful in his choice of location for the installation. It’s no coincidence that apartment 1112 overlooks Montreal’s Parc Lafontaine, a long-popular gay cruising ground in Montreal’s overwhelmingly francophone east end. The melancholy tone of Dorion’s installation results not only from the paintings themselves but also from the experience of seeing them in this otherwise barren domestic setting, which overlooks a site where gay men for so long congregated to cruise, make out and fuck in public with medical impunity (though still at considerable risk of homophobic assault and/or arrest). “Now we think/as we fuck” read the opening lines of a poem by the African-American writer Essex Hemphill, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1995. The poem encapsulates the moment that Dorion is addressing in “Chambres avec vues”—the moment when gay men realized that unprotected sex could be lethal. One painting quietly refers to the impact of AIDS on gay subcultural spaces. In Le Quai de Béthune (1998), a silver-grey rectangle floats in a murky field. The rectangle is in fact an unoccupied park bench (a recurring Dorion motif) that the artist photographed in Paris at a moment when the Seine had flooded its banks and the bench was surrounded by water. As he recalls,

The Quai de Béthune is on Île-St-Louis and it is a gay cruising ground. I took the picture from above, in a park, and the lower half of the painting shows that point of view—the top of the wall surrounding the park. It was March, a grey day, and the muddy water of the Seine had flooded the area. I liked this minimalist image of a grey rectangle (the bench) on the verge of disappearing in this opaque atmosphere. I think I saw it as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis and its death toll.

—

In one of the bedrooms of apartment 1112, Dorion installed Téléphone (1998), a seemingly straightforward painting of a wall-mounted telephone. In this context, the painting evokes a longing for connection, for human contact; but the telephone also has about it a menacing quality that brings to mind the fear and dismay that a ringing telephone too often induced at the height of the AIDS crisis, its role as the herald of dreadful news. Bruce Hugh Russell, writing in Parachute, has interpreted this work differently, in terms of the unheimlich (uncanny) quality of the telephone as a dated marker of modernity.

“Chambres avec vues” also included a painting of a scene in which a monochromatic painting hangs on a wall above a rumpled bed. The gentle folds of the bedding and the indented pillow point to the bed’s former occupant(s), now gone. This untitled painting is one of several executed by Dorion over the past decade that allude to the dialogue he has sustained with the works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose 1995 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum made a profound and lasting impression on the artist. I am not the first to note the relationship between Dorion’s painting and the 1992 billboard project Gonzalez-Torres created for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which comprised a vastly enlarged, strangely luminous black-and-white photograph of his own bed, its two pillows bearing concave impressions of the heads that once lay on them.

Since the late 1990s, Dorion has demonstrated extraordinary technical virtuosity in his painting, even as his subjects have become more personal, albeit in his controlled, coded way. Even at their most personal, his works don’t provide the viewer with easy access to anything more private than a general sense of melancholy that is consistent with the desolate subjects that attract his attention. Consider, for example, Bench, a 2006 painting of an empty park bench facing away from the viewer within a field of chartreuse. Its combination of a melancholy subject and a vivid use of light and colour exemplifies the balance that Dorion has achieved in his work over the past decade. Ferry (2006) depicts a pair of uninhabited blue-green plastic benches side by side on the deck of the ferry that crosses the St. Lawrence River at Rivièredu-Loup. Seen frontally, the benches form a strong horizontal mass just below the middle of the canvas. Dorion has abstracted his snapshot’s visual information to a point where the painted image brings to mind colour-field paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s (the scene as photographed is itself a found reference to modernist abstraction). More telling than the image’s capacity to open onto modern art history, however, is the way in which the twin benches in Ferry come to within a hair’s breadth of touching. The thin gap between the benches imparts tension and drama to the static image, lending poignancy and more than a whiff of desire to a viewer’s experience of a pair of otherwise soulless hard plastic objects. In their proximity and similarity, the benches suggest a couple—more precisely, a same-sex couple. Indeed, in 2001 Dorion gave the name Couple (Saint-Roch) to a painting of a pair of uninhabited chairs sitting next to one another in a cavernous and otherwise empty space.

Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn, among other gifted queer contemporaries, have also deployed pairs of objects as ciphers for same-sex couples. Gonzalez-Torres’s simple, moving Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987–90) consists of a pair of battery-operated office clocks that hang next to one another and mark time’s passage in perfect synchronicity—until one clock’s battery begins to fail and the “perfect lovers” fall out of sync. Gonzalez-Torres also created a photographic jigsaw puzzle (based on a snapshot of his own) depicting twin garden chairs, Untitled (Paris, Last Time, 1989) (1989); a pair of adjacent mirrors embedded in a wall, Untitled (Orpheus, Twice) (1991); a pair of suspended light bulbs, Untitled (March 5th) #2 (1991); and a pair of strings of lights, Untitled (Lovers- Paris) (1993), which he memorably laid beside one another on the floor, where they suggested twin puddles of post-coital luminosity. ⁴ Picturing pairs of things is a veiled way for Dorion to make the affective dimensions of his life available to others.

Giving poetic shape to one’s inner life in such a cautious, coded way relates back to Dorion’s professed anti-romanticism; furthermore, it echoes the dialectic of concealment and revelation that, according to the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is emblematic of the “epistemology of the closet.” In her groundbreaking book by that name, Sedgwick demonstrates, through close readings of canonical works by such novelists as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville and Henry James, the pivotal role of that dialectic in shaping modern literature, examining its power in terms of the terrifying force of the prohibition against same-sex desire. Sedgwick also addresses other culturally generative binary oppositions, including sentimental versus unsentimental, and argues that the qualifier “sentimental” became perhaps the ultimate term of derision in modernist culture as a result of the marginalization of the feminine in the construction and maintenance of patriarchal modernism. She argues for the importance of an unlikely postmodernist project that she identifies exclusively with women and gay men: the risky project of rehabilitating the sentimental. In visual art, Gonzalez-Torres’s emotionally resonant post-minimalism is central to this initiative, as are Dorion’s controlled yet poignant, suggestive yet indirect evocations of love, loss and vulnerability.⁵ To fully understand Dorion’s alienation from his own romantic impulses, it is helpful to recognize both the power of the cultural taboo against the sentimental and Dorion’s efforts to challenge the inhibiting effects of that prohibition.

The art historian and critic Miwon Kwon recently described Gonzalez-Torres’s art in terms of a conjoined dynamic of “intimacy-in-distance,” of “distance-in-intimacy.” Dorion similarly keeps the viewer removed and yet engaged, allowing a measure of doubt on our part about the nature and meaning of the enigmatic and desolate subjects he chooses to paint while drawing us in through the sensuality of his sometimes crystalline, sometimes muted surfaces. A notable development in Dorion’s work over the past decade has been a tendency toward greater brilliance and consistently vivid colour. Compared to the introspective self-portraits and the Roman views he painted in the early 1990s, his newer works display a marked clarity and chromatic intensity.

Dorion strikes a balance in his paintings between the formal and the personal, between removal and engagement. His subjects may be neutral and opaque or more transparent references to solitude, same-sex love and loss. He is consistently responsive, however, to the way the past reverberates throughout the everyday. His paintings attest to an incipient hopefulness—a fragile state of being more fully alive in the present.

1. The unconventional setting for the project at Les Dauphins recalls other instances in which curators and artists have chosen to exhibit art in non-museum, non-commercial settings; for example, Normand Thériault, Claude Gosselin and René Blouin’s 1985 staging of “AURORA BORÉALIS” in the lower levels of an apartment tower in downtown Montreal. That show included Dorion’s installation Mes confessions—perhaps his final expression of the ambivalent effects of Roman Catholic dogma and ritual on a queer kid growing up Québécois during the 1960s.
2. In tearing the fruit, Leonard symbolically enacts some of the rage she felt at the loss of this angry, articulate artist. The roughly stitched fruit sculptures imply the impossibility of complete repair while also quoting from Silence=Death, a 1990 video by Rosa von Praunheim (with Phil Zwickler) in which Wojnarowicz appears, unforgettably, with his mouth sewn shut, grommets and all.
3. Travel seems right: the Uliveto-brand water bottles suggest Italy as the site of this experience, as does the horizontally striped black-and-white T-shirt on the chair.
4. During the early 1990s, as the culture of identity politics was reaching critical mass, Gonzalez-Torres took considerable satisfaction in never incorporating homoerotic imagery into his work—at least not in any conventional sense. He took similar satisfaction in never trafficking in equally reductive ethnic stereotypes.
5. There are risks involved in attempting to rehabilitate the sentimental. Since 9/11, in the United States the Bush administration has used sentimental sops alongside terror alerts to prevent people from having or developing critical distance from the government’s manipulation and outright lies.

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