Doug Argue exhibition explores scale, palimpsests, and weightlessness

Doug Argue, Fish School, 2021. Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 in.

NEW YORK, NY.— Klaus Albrecht Schröder on the Work of Doug Argue

Edited from a speech originally delivered in German

I didn’t know Doug Argue, nor did I feel the slightest bit guilty about not knowing him. But one thing was immediately clear: the painting magnetized me. It was breathtaking, overwhelming in every way.

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It depicted, in a very simple central-perspective arrangement, hundreds—thousands—of cages stacked one above another, each containing a chicken. This painting became known as The Chicken Painting in Minnesota and, by now, far beyond.

I asked Doug what he had received for a painting like this, a work on which he had spent three years. Forty-four thousand dollars. Nothing for an unparalleled masterpiece.

With this painting and several others, Doug Argue achieved recognition far beyond Minnesota and New York. Visitors to One World Trade Center in New York will also have encountered his work: three enormous paintings installed in the building.

I had therefore filed Doug Argue away, so to speak, as a master of the monumental format.

Monumental painting has an important history, and Venice was particularly significant for Doug. He traveled there several times and encountered paintings whose scale transforms the spaces they inhabit—Tintoretto's works in the Doge's Palace and, especially, the Crucifixion in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.

Seeing paintings on this scale made an enormous impression on him. He understood what the format itself could do. In effect, he thought: I need to paint at this scale.

But later I discovered another Doug Argue.

The Painting as Palimpsest

I have a feeling for history and for transience—for the way one thing disappears and another takes its place. It can almost seem like the evolution of art history, although not in the conventional sense of a succession of styles. It is closer to a biological process: one thing replaces another.

Doug Argue found an extraordinary metaphor for this process.

You are probably familiar with the word palimpsest.

The word comes from the Greek. A palimpsest is a manuscript written on parchment. Because parchment was extremely precious and difficult to produce, an old text that was no longer considered useful might be scraped away so that another text could be written over it.

Again and again the parchment could be erased and overwritten. And today, using modern techniques, we can sometimes recover the layers hidden beneath the visible text.

Doug Argue has been exploring something very much like this in his paintings since around 2008.

He may begin with an image from the history of painting—Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, for example, or a still life by the Flemish painter Frans Snyders—and then place another layer over it: letters.

The relationship between writing and image is one of the complicated subjects of twentieth-century art. Picasso and Braque incorporated newspapers, letters and textual fragments into Cubism. In Russian Suprematism, the letter could lose its linguistic meaning and become pure form.

With Doug Argue, however, the relationship occupies a strange intermediate territory.

The letters may originate in texts by Melville, Rimbaud or Genesis, but they are distorted, bent and stretched. They no longer necessarily communicate the content of the original text. Instead, they become a visual layer of their own. I thought: This is the language of Doug Argue.

A Completely New World

And then I came to the gallery and suddenly encountered a completely new world: the underwater paintings.

I thought about them for a long time.

My first thought was: perhaps these fish are nothing more than the letters taking shape.

But then I thought back to the painting with which I began—the Chicken Painting.

A school of fish appears, at first glance, to be composed of animals that look alike. The school behaves collectively. The relationship between the individual fish and the community of fish can hardly be separated.

And yet this is almost the opposite of the Chicken Painting.

In that painting from the early 1990s, every chicken is represented individually, but every individual is imprisoned within a cage. Moreover, the entire painting is organized according to central perspective. Historically, perspective can also be understood as a structure of control: everything is aligned toward a single point; everything must obey that point.

The paintings of schools of fish operate differently.

There are artists who paint pictures, and there are artists who paint rooms. Doug Argue is capable of painting rooms.

But these fish paintings are something else.

They are remarkably flat. We are confronted with a swarm that begins somewhere beyond the painting and ends somewhere beyond it. The image could continue two meters to the left, two meters to the right, upward or downward. What we see is a fragment—a section taken from something potentially limitless.

And again we arrive at a question that seems fundamental to Doug Argue's work:

What is the individual? What is the community? How free is the individual, and how individual can one remain within the group?

Doug insists that the fish do not all look alike. They are individuals.

Yet when we look at a school of fish, unless we know one of them intimately, we perceive the group before we perceive the individual.

This tension between the one and the many is central to these paintings.

Weightlessness

And then there is the water.

Suddenly Doug is playing with water and with the weightlessness experienced by a diver.

Anyone who has dived knows this extraordinary sensation. There is a lightness and a freedom, even a disappearance of ordinary scale.

Underwater is another world.

We live on land. We are governed by gravity. We spend our lives resisting it simply to stand and walk upright.

But for the brief moment in which we float underwater, we experience something entirely different. We no longer have to resist gravity in the same way. We can simply float with the animals.

The fish therefore become, for me, symbolic figures of freedom.

There is something fluid in this world: the possibility of moving in any direction, while at the same time an entire school moves together.

Perhaps there is something we can learn from that.

Our contemporary society is extraordinarily individualized. Confront a room full of people with a political question and they may immediately move in thirty different directions. We are individuals, but increasingly we may cease to experience ourselves as a community capable of moving together.

These are philosophical thoughts that come to me when I stand before this wonderful art.

One could therefore say: Doug Argue is obviously a philosopher.
Yes.

But he is also a painter. He is a great painter.

Light

What fascinates me particularly is the way Doug captures light.

Light has been present in his paintings for a long time. It catches itself within the letters, within the stenciled and distorted forms. The letters themselves seem to bring light into the paintings.

And now he has brought light somewhere entirely different.

He has brought light into the underwater world.

It is a kind of light that we mortals who walk upon the earth do not normally know.
The fish know it.

And when we join them, we know it too.

In the art of Doug Argue, we participate in this strange, mysterious, liberating, weightless world beneath the water.

I find this development fascinating.

The exhibition brings together the great perspectival explosions of the earlier paintings—including works connected to the monumental Genesis painting at One World Trade Center—with this newest development.

And now I am curious.

What Doug Argue will we encounter in another three years? Another six?

Great artists have the ability continually to redevelop and reinvent themselves.

Doug, I offer you my warmest congratulations on this wonderful exhibition. Thank you.