Tender Offer
© Image Credits to Manuel Carreon Lopez @kunstdokumentationcom
© detail shots by Jana Perusich
„Weapons Of Mass Seduction“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„Lost? Draw A Map. Then Paint The Picture.“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„The Sphynx And The Pyramid Scheme“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„All Pleasure Leads To Inner Decay“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„I Am Perpetually Haunted By A Future That Could Have Been“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„In This Interregnum A Great Variety Of Morbid Symptoms Appear“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„I’m Just As Confused As You Are“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„Living Inside The Mind Of Somebody Who Lost His Own“,
2022, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„Everything You Like I Have Never Even Heard Of“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 65 x 50 cm
„Wunderkerze“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 65 x 50 cm
„Achilles“,
2022, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 65 x 50 cm
„Wellness Faktor X“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 65 x 50 cm
„Top Down“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 65 x 50 cm
„Harvest“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„Looking For Fun“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
„REM“,
2023, oil on canvas, stainless steel frame, 50 x 65 cm
“Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then
amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which
consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications.”
– Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism. 1991.
The German saying, ‘der
Schein trügt’ defines a dichotomy in which something, once revealed,
defies its original impression and therefore deceives. The initial assumption
of the subject/object is made based off its first impression or surface-layer
(whether conceptual or aesthetic), its shell: ‘All
that glitters is not gold’.
In his solo exhibition Tender Offer, Marc Henry’s paintings reveal
such tensions, drawing from the ever-proliferating peripheries of authenticity,
inauthenticity and their mystification within our day-to-day relentless hyper
capitalist machine. Revealing fragments of our strange postmodern reality, his
works establish deceptive innuendos by exploring controversies in our current
wellness, luxury and consumerist economy or by referencing historicised iconic
cultural emblems such as the ancient relic the sphinx of Giza and Greek
mythology such as Achilles. With an array of assertive steel-framed oil
paintings at arm’s length, we bite the
bullet and face fragments of a nuanced pastiche that reflect our idiosyncratic
postmodern condition, or as critical theorist Frederic Jameson reiterates, ‘the
cultural logic of late capitalism.’ [1]
We are reminded of Baudrillard’s
Simulacra and Simulation, in which cultural tools of representation (both
virtual and physical) ‘simulate’ our
lived experiences when confronted with The Sphinx and Pyramid Scheme.For the technical process behind this work, Henry uploads an image found online
of The Sphinx of the Seashore (1879) by Elihu Vedder, based on the statue of
the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt constructed in around 2500 BC. He then edits
this image within the
programme DALL-E developed by OpenAI. This artificial intelligence generates
digital images from language descriptions named ‘prompts.’ Infinitely
removed from its original context, the reproduced image becomes obsolete – its
authenticity called into question. Yet, by transferring the final rendition
onto the canvas with thick, expressionistic oil strokes and framing the work
with stainless steel, Henry solidifies its mutated presence in real-time, in
the here and now. Before us is its sheer haptic corporeality.
In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
condemns consumer culture by building on the critique of commodity fetishism in
Marx, asserting that ‘All that once was
directly lived has become mere representation.’[2] Images circulating, proliferating and flowing through
time within networks of capital are constantly disseminated, reconfigured,
enhanced, adapted or replaced. Within the free flow of information, images
become endless amorphous mutations that dextrously foreshadow signs and symbols
aimed at the consumer yet also bring into question the authenticity and power
or impact of an image.
Such is apparent in I Am Perpetually Haunted By a
Future That Could Have Been, which depicts a mask that was initially welded
and posted on a blog by an unknown welder living in eastern Europe, that was
subsequently mistaken for being an authentic thirteenth-century bishop’s
mask on twitter and subreddits. The image proliferated online across countless
blogs and platforms until it was fallaciously historicised as it was published
on multiple acclaimed history platforms on an international scale. Henry’s
incorporation of photoshop and DALL-E further quantified and multiplied the
initial image, with the final rendition translated into painterly form across
the canvas. We are confronted with an arrangement of artificially generated
masks whose eerie glitches remain captured in its expressionistic, physical,
and painterly form.
The original rare ivory and diamond coated Russian
Fabergé eggs
symbolise ‘high-end’ luxury
and have been swallowed up and incorporated into mainstream culture on a
multifaceted scale, stressing ‘what the commodity
had already shown itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process of
quantitative development.’[3] In This Interregnum a Great
Variety of Morbid Symptoms Appear, captures an
online image of a 2008 Alexander McQueen ‘Fabergé egg purse’ which
Henry subsequently rendered, generated and multiplied using photoshop and
DALL-E. A photoshopped Venezuelan poodle moth furry in its texture sits amongst
the contrastingly flat and reflective concoction of AI simulated Fabergé eggs.
Debord states that ‘the
spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the
existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an
additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In
all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or
direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of
socially dominant life.’ Removed from its
original function, the play on words of the title of the work Weapons of
Mass Seduction, goes hand in hand with rendering the function of the object
obsolete: Its fragile medium depicted as glass stressing its ornamental and
alluring qualities. Contrasting tensions are further explored through the
painterly technique that is required in order to depict the opacity of glass
against the dense smoothly textured surface the object shines forth from.
Tender Offer reflects on the ever-conglomerating late-capitalist
machine, our place within it and asks us to engage with what is beyond the
alluring surface of our day-to-day goings on. The power of the ever-mutating
dissemination of the image is further pulled into question, its absurdity made
apparent. In the cultural logic of the present, we are faced with an ongoing
uncomfortable truth: Nothing is what it seems, everything is but a pastiche and
“In a world which
really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”[4]
Text: Sayori Radda
[1] Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991
[2] Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Rebel Press,
London, 1992.
[3] See ibid.
[4] See ibid.