Sean Landers - The Hogarth Series and Other Work Based On Art History.

The Hogarth Series and Other Work Based On Art History.

Landers began to tell the story of his life through paintings and used art history to do it. In 1996 he based an entire series of thirteen paintings on a William Hogarth painting A Midnight Modern Conversation (1732). This autobiographical series told the story of growing up and of outgrowing the drinking-based camaraderie on which he and his friends had subsisted for so long. Landers remembers a “distinct sense of liberation on completing these works and credits them with opening up a range of possibilities for non-text based work, including narrative painting, in the broadest sense which he continues to explore today.” This body of work has been exhibited the most of any body of Landers’s work and was most recently the subject of a solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York in 2011, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essay.

In 1997, continuing to represent his life and self though imagery, he presented paintings that were an amalgam of two or three art historical paintings done in a Disney-like cartoon style. For Landers, the Disney influence was important because it represented the collective unconscious of imagery for people raised in the Baby Boom era and forward. By referencing Matisse, Poussin, Homer, Gericault and Disney, he was comparing himself in order to “illustrate my or any artist’s predicament of trying to make ‘new’ art in the wake of art history, and more specifically, in the wake of my generation’s art education, which was dominated by theory, conceptual art, minimalism and process art. These shows were my humble effort to reinsert form back into conceptual art…. It was a conceptual art act that was anti-conceptual.”

Returning to writing for his psychological survival, Landers turned to Magritte’s Vache period for his inspiration and found painterly freedom once again. For the first time, the image came to the fore and the writing became the support structure. As Landers said, “all of my vache figures are… an extension of my clown language.” Landers used automatic drawing techniques of the Surrealists to form the image, which was never preconceived, “I’d pick up my brush and I’d paint a cartoon in the middle of a canvas, not like it, wipe it off, and repeat that process ten to twenty times…often with that many ghosts of old drawings a new drawing begins to emerge.” The majority of the paintings in this series were made between 1997 and 2000.

Landers sees twentieth century art as divided by the art of Picasso, who typifies the traditional painterly vein – an artist sitting in front of a blank canvas, and Duchamp, the grandfather of conceptual art. During the time of 2000 to 2003, Landers made paintings that melded various aspects of both artists to create a body of work that typified both. Both Picasso and Duchamp used borrowed imagery; Picasso from other artists such as Rembrandt, Velásquez and Delacroix to announce his belief that he belonged among their history, while Duchamp introduced the idea of the “ready-made”. Landers said “therefore, borrowing another’s imagery can be seen as ‘ready-made'.” For example, when he used Picasso’s imagery to spell his first name, and the word “genius”, he “was using Duchamp to riff on Picasso, melding them together to describe myself and my situation as an artist.” Around this time Landers made three performative audio pieces, The Man Within (2000), Dear Picasso (2001), and Becoming Great (2002), designed to be played during the three solo exhibitions they were made for. As with his other mediums, he “ just picked up the microphone, switched into character and let it rip."

During this period, Landers went on to continue to pay homage to Duchamp and Picasso as well as other artists with which he shares a personal affinity, Picabia, Magritte, Dali, De Chirico, Braque, Beckmann, and Ernst by depicting them either as clowns or as ghosts. Landers said, “Painting someone as a clown is putting them in my pantheon, you know? It’s not an insult. Painting them as a ghost is similar. So I was communicating with Max Ernst, and Picabia. But there was another level, too. What I like about the Surrealists is that they are guys who would sit in front of a blank canvas and allow their stream-of-consciousness to in some way fill the emptiness. Which is exactly what I am doing when I fill a giant empty white canvas with text...but in a different way.”