The Brooklyn Rail

In his solo exhibition Oh Fortuna! at Clearing, Henry Curchod’s oil and charcoal works reveal undercurrents. They are superimpositions, like Baudelaire’s “Double Room,” a duet of space that finds octaves in registers of ethereal light and the darker tones of alienation, a living atlas of suspended tristesse and doubt. They instill a quiet in us, as we peer through blinds and look down on alleys from above; we are stuck inside, trying our best to not be discovered. We are sometimes alone, and sometimes amongst others that still make us feel alone, but we always find ourselves shaped in vivid color.

Curchod has made a language of dissipation that generates a melancholic semper dissolubilis under everything depicted. The oil sticks Curchod uses catch along the linen surface as a shimmer, producing a magnetic and sensuous ennui. The ground breaks through, latticing tones of dark and light that together are a resistant book of hours, meant to keep the shades of obumbrata at a distance. That so much is done in oil stick feels like an urgency by the artist—to hold something deep in the hand or the back of the palm and address the surface close, almost to the knuckle, and shape out form quickly. If the long brushes of Brice Marden and others produce a cursive line, the more direct stick performs a pastel smudge, a spread along the surface. It is also about keeping the sense of drawing, and with it its sense of scale, of seeing a world not rendered but found out.

Outside of the interest in these surfaces, space feels like the priority of Curchod’s current work. The artist slots in representation into sequences of shape that often are suspended from above, like Susan Rothenberg’s Galisteo Creek (1992). Curchod returns to this type of gravity dive, a vantage of firescapes and walk-ups, observing the spectral missed connections and all the vibrant alienation the city contains within its edge. Each space feels like the center barely holds but is propped up by some important angle that keeps it all from caving in. In Spiralling Downwards (2023), I think of how important that left edge is, how the sidewalk becomes a tent stake holding up the inside-outside of the red and an indecipherable exchange against it. In that way many of these paintings are about parasocial experiences, a world made up of only men and boys framed in indistinct moments of drama or boredom that is taken in from a great distance, disconnected from the crowd. It is gestures between others kept occluded from our inference, as we perceive the world from the vaguest edges of vision, yearning for a closer look. We become the formation of each scene’s lonely echo.

What is it about this turn towards the darkness of the crowd that makes the grotesque mask of Ensor or the caricature of Toulouse-Lautrec feel so vital in this moment? There has been significant writing on the aesthetic category of cute from Sianne Ngai, and how social media makes it easy to adopt cuteness for its ability to reflect our own felt vulnerability and extend it to something else. However, less discussed are the dark currents of the gothic within painting, which can be found in the galleries on Henry Street and Broadway; in the work of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Peter Doig, Kai Althoff, and Sanya Kantarovsky; and the archives of Daily Lazy, Ofluxo, and Tzvetnik. They host the Munchian worlds of phantasms, made up of faces with sharp features and toothy smiles that move gracefully in the perimeter of the crowd. It seems on one level to distance painting from the cuteness of virtual space; but such a shadowed world also rose to prominence the lockdown, growing in tandem with our loss of feeling comfortable in groups, aligning itself with our deeper suspicions of larger cultural divides. It feels relevant to draw the connection between these shadowed figures and our growing mistrust of the public, the slipping masks and ominous grotesque of the neighbors we thought shared our own ideals.

Curchod applies these masks to the day traders, the stock market interns looking for cover underneath their jackets as children fling lit cigarettes at them from above. They feel listless, insensate. Curchod communicates their attempts at rest as something uncomfortable or done without the knowledge of how to relax. Their bodies imply a sense that they feel shielded from consequence, but still communicate the gestures of uncertainty, however small. The title of the exhibition addresses the poem and song “Oh Fortuna” and frames these moments as a reminder that we are all susceptible to the crescendo and the crash. Maybe our attraction to this moment, and the shift from Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge to Wall Street, is our own desire to feel some pleasure, or something, in the face of collapse. Maybe it is in the words catching in our lungs that no one will make it out of this unscathed, that no matter how far down they dig their doomsday shelters or how well they pack their bug-out bags, we’re all headed towards the same end. Maybe it is to see in the faces of the crowd that we all were children once. Or maybe it is simply to see some beauty in the eclipsing fade out.