Evan Penny - Reviews & Essays

“My work is more closely related to Paul Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti than to Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.”1 Evan Penny’s assertion may seem paradoxical. But it actually contains within it the pivotal principles of a quest that aims to disturb by reinventing the image, stripped of any immediately recognisable representation or obvious certainty.

Whilst the entire contemporary art scene that takes George Segal as its point of reference acts on the absurdity related to the real, exacerbating tautological and self-referential elements, Penny underscores the latent state of the observer, attracted and simultaneously repelled by what is as obvious as it is familiar.

His approach develops cognitive doubt vis-a-vis the enigmatic presence of representation, which becomes precarious and uncertain.

Ever since the days of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans or his Brillo Box series, the concept of mimesis has once again become extremely topical, regaining unexpected status within the art world. The shifting relationship between the real and the artistic dimension has become a fundamental conceptual consideration as a result of the progressive separation of art and life. As Arthur Danto affirms, what counts is the relationship that links the “thing” to the elements that the eye cannot perceive.

Mimesis has therefore initiated a process of liberation, although this has been misused over the past decade. In the context of hyperrealist sculpture, the cast has taken the place of the ready-made with a manic and alienating adhesion to the skin, which has become the key element in recognition. The myth of Pygmalion has been abandoned and the new statue has grown more substantial, a copy, a mannequin or a straightforward transformation of banal everyday life.

At the same time a process has been unfolding in the social sphere that I would define as self-directed modelling; the advent of facelifts and plastic surgery has made it possible for everyone to alter their own body, as if this were a plastic space to be redefined in keeping with the myth of Dorian Gray. As a result, whereas on the one hand sculpture has elaborated the aesthetic of the cast as a means of distancing itself from the world, society has also taken possession of the process of shaping and modelling.

Penny adopts a rather different approach in which adhesion to hyperrealism and to the object per se appears to be solely a mise-en-scène, playing tricks on the intellect and on the eye. Beyond the façade, the artist triggers a sabotage-style action which calls into question the perceptual component on the basis of a methodology aimed at removing the gaze by preventing it from remaining fixed in place. This in essence signifies a type of vision that becomes a locus around which new images can be constructed.

In this sense, the reference to Cézanne seems particularly germane, for the French master paints the material that lies within the form with a view to reconstructing the object, taking its essence as english “My work is more closely related to Paul Cézanne and Alberto Giacometti than to Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.”1 Evan Penny’s assertion may seem paradoxical. But it actually contains within it the pivotal principles of a quest that aims to disturb by reinventing the image, stripped of any immediately recognisable representation or obvious certainty. Whilst the entire contemporary art scene that takes George Segal as its point of reference acts on the absurdity related to the real, exacerbating tautological and self-referential elements, Penny underscores the latent state of the observer, attracted and simultaneously repelled by what is as obvious as it is familiar. His approach develops cognitive doubt vis-a-vis the enigmatic presence of representation, which becomes precarious and uncertain. Ever since the days of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans or his Brillo Box series, the concept of mimesis has once again become extremely topical, regaining unexpected status within the art world. The shifting relationship between the real and the artistic dimension has become a fundamental conceptual consideration as a result of the progressive separation of art and life. As Arthur Danto affirms, what counts is the relationship that links the “thing” to the elements that the eye cannot perceive. Mimesis has therefore initiated a process of liberation, although this has been misused over the past decade. In the context of hyperrealist sculpture, the cast has taken the place of the ready-made with a manic and alienating adhesion to the skin, which has become the key element in recognition. The myth of Pygmalion has been abandoned and the new statue has grown more substantial, a copy, a mannequin or a straightforward transformation of banal everyday life. At the same time a process has been unfolding in the social sphere that I would define as self-directed modelling; the advent of facelifts and plastic surgery has made it possible for everyone to alter their own body, as if this were a plastic space to be redefined in keeping with the myth of Dorian Gray. As a result, whereas on the one hand sculpture has elaborated the aesthetic of the cast as a means of distancing itself from the world, society has also taken possession of the process of shaping and modelling. Penny adopts a rather different approach in which adhesion to hyperrealism and to the object per se appears to be solely a mise-en-scène, playing tricks on the intellect and on the eye. Beyond the façade, the artist triggers a sabotage-style action which calls into question the perceptual component on the basis of a methodology aimed at removing the gaze by preventing it from remaining fixed in place. This in essence signifies a type of vision that becomes a locus around which new images can be constructed. In this sense, the reference to Cézanne seems particularly germane, for the French master paints the material that lies within the form with a view to reconstructing the object, taking its essence as a point of departure in a gradual process of establishing increasing distance, moving away from the immediate recognition of the object. What counts is not reproduction but representation by deploying one’s own gaze and observing in a different way. In this fashion the same place (think for example of Montagne Saint-Victoire) is transformed each time in the face of the re-emergence of the original perception.

It is no coincidence that Cézanne constitutes an essential point of reference for Giacometti, who turned the visible and its relationship with the absolute into the beating heart of his artistic explorations. In an interview with David Sylvester, published in 1975 on the occasion of an exhibition at the Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris, Giacometti declared himself defeated by the impossibility of perceiving the visible: “If I did not know that your skull has a certain depth, I would not be able to imagine it. I can make your head life size because I know that it is life size. I no longer see directly, I see through my consciousness; this always happens, sometimes to a lesser, sometimes to a greater degree.”

Penny addresses the accident of sight by working on the emotive component of the object in order to disorientate the viewer, confronting the audience with a disruption of all their certainties. Knowledge is mediated through the prism of the impossibility of recognising objects or recognising one another, as if suddenly everything around us had become strange and uncontrollable.

In Penny’s oeuvre, distortions of perspective, multiple identities, changes in scale and the paring down of the third dimension all create a gulf between his work and the apparently real, plunged definitively into crisis.

Furthermore, reacting to the veracity of the materials triggers a mechanism of scepticism and distancing from the work, which plays a decisive part in the ambiguity of the act of looking. This proves to be a very different attitude than that which we feel when looking at a hyperrealist sculpture, which underscores a sense of estrangement or alienation but does not disrupt the gaze per se. Duane Hanson’s figures, created as casts of people busily going about their work, for example, confront us with doubts as to whether we are looking at a flesh-and-blood figure or a copy. However, once this presence is defined as a work of art within a museum, we ponder the way in which it is set in the space and the significance it may assume. The situation is different when we consider Penny’s work, for he does not confront us with a copy of the real but plays tricks on our gaze and leads us into a shadowy zone where our certainties are smashed to smithereens. His works, although they take a traditional framework as their point of departure and are created autonomously rather than as casts, are so perfect and sophisticated in their use of forms and materials that they look like some kind of artificial, technological product. Paradoxically, they are more real than the real and this sets off an unpredictable and illusionistic short-circuit in which the viewer loses all points of reference. Confronted with Penny’s creations, the immaterial seems to determine its own physical presence in a context in which analogue procedures challenge the digital, turning certainty on its head.

Whilst technology strives to attain a perfect replica of the real on the basis of an irreversible evolutionary principle, Penny disrupts this logic, demonstrating that it is possible to constrain the virtual system, which is forced to come to terms with its ancient clone, or rather, with the perfection of the illusion. Obviously, the question is somewhat more complex and it would be reductionist to present this as merely a nostalgic encounter between the old and the new world. What takes shape is a new system of rules in which the image generates itself and no longer needs to refer to a specific initial model. Memory is reshaped and the physical dimension develops a relationship with the virtual dimension, based on osmosis. No One – In Particular is a cycle of works created by Penny between 2001 and 2004 in which the subject no longer needs to find a particular interlocutor but becomes a reference model, a mental construct of a body, a locus around which infinite avatars can come into being.

“All art”, Ernst Gombrich wrote, “originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world”. And Penny is well aware of that.

Alberto Fiz