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Krisjanis Kaktins-GorslineNervous Lattice / Treillis Nerveux

January 19 - February 25, 2012
Opening: January 19, 2012 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM

b. 1980, lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada

Nervous Lattice / text by Clayton Deutsch

The body of paintings and drawings on view are perverse examinations of inner life, mocking the psychoanalytical approach by deigning to retroactively imbue the painted object with a non-correlated subjective aura – a bourgeois fantasy disguised as Lacanian analysis.

The nervousness is in the presentation, the morose and coerced frontality of the compositions that exude all the equanimity of a mugshot. Yet the forms do not seem “ready for the camera.” They seem to possess previous lives, once full contours. One wonders that crimes, joys, liberties, bonds now appear, sliced into what feels like tragic, debased arrangements.

There are two mechanisms at work: a brutal Heideggerian mechanism and a photographic mechanism. The first classifies, cuts, and suspends the object – operations performed under the pretense of truth – and the second represents it, trading the original truth claims as nothing more than a system of material and social classification. To represent subjects as partial objects, cut across their central axis, down the spine with industrial precision, is to hyperbolize the criminal element latent within portraiture. The portraitist is a petty thief compared to the executioner.

That there could be a criminal element to portraiture was a position that fell out of favor with the amnesiac claims that history was over. More denial than any sort of resolution, amnesiac practices sought to work within the production logics and channels of image culture in order to move past Enlightenment-based ideological debates regarding the autonomy of the artistic sphere. When bad painting, which eschewed virtuosity and verisimilitude for dumbness and cliche, began to move into a strong position vis-a-vis other forms of cultural production, it effectively defaulted on its original promise to steadfastly occupy a weak position so as to resist the conflation of the 2-dimensional support and hegemonic modes of image production. Kaktins-Gorsline’s cross-sections of partial bodies, inhabited by the ghosts of the subjectivities not contained within, serve as a strong rejoinder to the well-documented market success of “bad painting” over the past decade, that style production is no longer an effective form of critique.