Mark Grotjahn

Clarinette, Picasso

Bibemus, Cezanne

The more I look at Grotjahn's work, the more I think about Cezanne, Cubism, and the use of perspectival space. Cubism's premise is that the viewer sees various views of an object, all at once, in a flattened space (think of a map of the world). Forget objects, or flattening, now we get to see the construct of space itself from multiple angles as it recedes. Pretty cool.

Saltz mentioned in the article posted below, the notion of death anxiety or fear of the unknown. I had a prof that stated that all artists' work is about death or sex and sex is about death. A little morbid and yes, perhaps just a touch pessimistic but I agree in this instance. The monochromatic paintings I've seen (sadly not in person) deliver the somber elegy-like tone that makes me certainly think of infinitude, the unknown, a skewed sense of space that is off kilter (fear).

Back to Cezanne, the father of modernism. There is so much information out there on him and I wouldn't be able to do him justice, so I won't try to explain other than to say that his precarious, space that is somehow flat and spatial at once, is constructed in such a way, that there is a glimmer of the multiple views later taken and run with by Picasso and Braques. I see the "lineage" in Grotjahn's work and find it interesting to trace even if he is essentially flipping it upside down or out, or in, or opposing it in some way.

What makes this work relevant though? It seems (thankfully) there is no trace of irony or cynicism. But I certainly feel as if he is drawing deep from his modernist roots. Well, I don't have the answer to that and I don't condemn it for that either, it just makes me wonder.