Lucy Hogg: Mastering the Old Masters

For her third show in her adopted city of Washington, the former Vancouver artist Lucy Hogg has lined two parallel walls in a narrow gallery with oval canvases painted in odd monochromes—muted plums and raspberries, olive-lime, bruised grey, brick, teal, tamped scarlet and dulled turquoise. From each oval a face, limned in various light and dark tones of the same hue, seems to emerge, becoming more distinct as the eye adjusts. Hogg has rendered a collection of mostly unattractive, fleshy, often middle-aged individuals, the kind of people one might pass on the street, or sit next to at the movies or in church. A couple of them look familiar.

Like all of Hogg’s recent productions, the works in the exhibition, which is titled “Floating Faces,” are copies of Old Master paintings. When we look with that knowledge, the familiar countenances become recognizable: Convivial Man (Purple/Red) (2005) excerpts the grinning central figure in Velázquez’s The Triumph of Bacchus in the Prado, while Comfortable Boy (Pthalo Green) (2008) recaps Titian’s Portrait of Ranuccio Farnese in Washington’s National Gallery. Other canvases, despite their provenances in paintings by the likes of Rubens, Rembrandt and Delacroix, are not as instantly recognizable, which is precisely Hogg’s point. The likenesses from images of the distant past—shorn by the artist of their clothing, gestures and settings, their hairstyles reduced to the schematic and generic, all traces of their location in history elided—appear to portray ordinary, living men and women, unique, specific, full of personality and foible. Smug Woman (Orange) (2005), after a Rubens in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, stares at us, doe-eyed and quizzical, with pursed lips; Bemused Man (Cadmium Green) (2005), from a Rembrandt in the Metropolitan, wears the tints of the Incredible Hulk and half-smiles, his eyes nearly twinkling.

These faces speak to the enduring life of the kind of Old Master representation that retains its hold on us because of its approximation of our own preferred way of seeing: photography. Hogg says she searched for “the proto-photographic moment,” and she has found images of fleeting expressions, ephemeral glances and transitory states of mind that suggest the decisive click of a camera’s shutter rather than the longue durée of traditional portraiture. That the Old Masters used lenses and optical devices (which both anticipate photography and are its direct ancestors) to achieve this sort of realism indicates the desirability of such a mode of representation from early on.

Hogg’s serial portraits play with the conventions of both photography and painting, articulating continuities between them while embodying their difference. Her strange monochromes evoke the alienating yet familiar grisaille of black-and-white photographs. Her masterful combination of linear marks and more volumetric handling analogizes the simultaneous abstract flatness and three-dimensional modulation produced by the camera. Even the way the bodiless faces seem to coalesce in the centre of each panel might correspond to a photographic image appearing on the paper in a developing tray. These faces float in the space of their coloured panels, and in a timeless present, but they also seem to drift, unmoored from epistemological anchors in a shifting sea of meaning. (916 G St NW, Washington DC)