The Brooklyn Rail

Monsieur Zohore’s newest show at Magenta Plains, Get Well Soon, is staged like a play mid-climax. Given the artist’s background in performance, it’s an apt choice. At one opening, Zohore presided over the audience in a coffin that he transformed into a kissing booth. In the middle of Get Well Soon, a wheelchair user is upside down; a baby kneels on an anthill of rice before a cross; a nurse perches at the top of a stairlift fastened to a wall, legs crossed and hips twisted as though in half-contrapposto. Zohore grafts a complex network of images to the skin of these figures, including references to the objecthood of culture, the vaulted works of literature, and the degraded excess of mass media.

Invasive / Proceedures (2005–2024) invokes the rear form of Robert Gober’s Untitled (Butt) (1994), channeling Gober’s wry brand of homoerotic commodity fetishism. But where musical notes emanate from Gober’s curtailed bust, on Zohore’s version, photographs flicker. A braid of Bounty paper towel, which also serves as the torso’s skin (as with much of Zohore’s work), falls like a trellis along the figure’s backside. The statue is damp and the skein is pulpy, as though rescued from a flood. Nude photos from Rashid Johnson’s Self-Portrait in homage to Barkley Hendricks (2005) appear on the butt and the hip of the statue. In this work, Johnson restaged Hendricks’s nude self-portrait, Brilliantly Endowed (Self Portrait) (1977), wearing only sunglasses, a gold chain, bracelets, white crew socks, and a cap. Much like Gober recalling the Belvedere Torso, Johnson appeals to the specter of art history and the nude as an art object—and now, a commodity, referencing Hendricks and the art market’s fetishization of Black creativity. Zohore degrades the images and stains parts of the body and the braid—these appear almost like burns, charring the sculpture. There is also a Trojan head on the shoulder blade, giving way to a host of masculine significations. The soggy paper towel and the clipped images suggest that this historical body, rendered again and again across time, is an unstable representation. The skin itself signifies this instability. By embedding images of Johnson onto a white paper towel dermis, Zohore subverts the authoritative posture of the white nude.

The humor in Zohore’s work is explicit, yet the effect often leaves one reveling in subtle aftershocks. In Tableaux / Vivant (1993–2024), a skeleton sits on the wall, arms raised in the air, readying itself for violence. In one hand, the skeleton holds a palette. Its bones are covered with hundred dollar bills and paper towels, and it appears to be breaking out in a rash of red “sold” gallery stickers. On the gallery’s website, press photos show the artist-as-skeleton holding a bedpan full of urine in its sacrum, but when I visited the bedpan was underneath, empty save for a couple of coins. In this iteration, the artist/skeleton’s story seems more complete—after getting the piss kicked out of it, it’s been sold out and left for broke.

Ridin’ / Dirty (1962–2024) is the upturned person in the wheelchair. Along their body, Zohore tattoos the Lichtenstein painting Masterpiece (1962) on the lower back, Cory Monteith on shoulder, three mugshots of Lindsay Lohan on the forearm, Chiquita banana stickers suturing the skull. The figure’s compromised position suggests heightened duress, and Zohore overloads the body with images so it brims with meaning. Zohore throws all kinds of clashing signifiers together, simultaneously setting up access and potential barriers for audiences. Pop culture is a woven fabric that contracts and expands. Some references strike like lightning, others only rumble in the distance. This negotiation of access and layering of information makes Zohore’s work feel vibrational.

A love of pop culture can be seen as gauche, puerile, maybe amoral, but we’re all secretly obsessed—and the inability to resolve that tension animates Zohore’s art. Queerness is similarly a lascivious excess, compressed through the strictures of consumerism. To conceal this excess, we bandage ourselves in paper towels. But shame is the underlining of pride, and so we bleed, and the effect is that everyone can see, and holding together the scraps of paper towel becomes a performance. It’s as though we’re watching a moment of frenzied introspection theatricalized.

In Gross Play Doctors (1875–2024), the artist collages Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber from The Manchurian Candidate, cartoon Frankensteins, emoji-esque broken hearts, a smeared pattern like smudged paisleys diffusing through the paper towels and bleeding down the sides of the canvas. Splatters of bleach flash across the images. “ZORA NEALE HURSTON, Author of Their Eyes Were Watching God” sits as a header near the top of the collage. In that book, the journey towards self-actualization is bound to that first dispatch of voicelessness—one’s childhood (the figure of the child features prominently in Get Well Soon). Zohore seizes us first with his humor and reflexiveness, until we are struck by the immense reality of his work.