The Brooklyn Rail

Beauty, as my great grandmother once said, should never be mistaken as frivolous. Once, when I asked her how she made it through the Great Depression, she let out a slight, melancholic laugh and said: “Roses. They were considered a luxury then, but I couldn’t have made it without them. If I didn’t see something pretty when I woke up every morning… well….”

Though the texture of cherished memories shifts as we age, I can still remember pressing further, attempting to understand the facts, desperate for stratagems of survival. “But how did you get the roses?” I asked. To which my grandmother, bristling with disdain at the prospect of having to repeat herself, sighed operatically. “Oh darling,” she said in a voice of feigned simplicity, “Beauty is always non-negotiable.”

Paolo Roversi’s latest exhibition, Along the Way at Pace Gallery amplifies this sentiment, reminding us that beauty, when unleashed and at its most potent, is vengeance. In a world of sustained barbarism, fear-mongering, a world of war and all its porous traumas, how often are romantic dreams seized and slaughtered? Since, by definition, war is armed conflict, rarely do we comprehend the most nefarious modes of its antagonism—those through which our bodies and minds are bifurcated and conditioned by oppression. How seldom do we feel the holistic harmony of mind, body, and spirit coalescing into a single breathless moment? Such a state of being is sometimes called “dream-body-language,” a term used by somatic psychologists to describe the most embodied tier of thinking.

Roversi’s show opens with a carbon print titled Robert Frank’s Coffee Pot, Studio Luce, Paris (2021). Like a relic, this still life shows a metal pot on a bare wooden table, its surface patinated by residues of time. Next to it, Mabou - Coal Mine Road (2006) stretches out like Dorothy’s journey to Oz, the stark plain suggesting a road of perdition. Another photograph, a portrait of artists and spouses June Leaf and Robert Frank, offers an unassuming view of reality. The couple’s faces are etched with lines of wisdom, their eyes weighted by bags that suggest they have seen more than enough. Though the background is relatively barren, the fierce sparks of dignity in their eyes, as well as their smiles—one wide and pure, the other subtler but still perceptible if one gets close—are radiantly telling. If one were ignorant of the subjects and their success, they might be mistaken for two farmers living in an era of destitution. But even so, the rarity of their expressions, their stoic jubilance, shows that even though life is impossibly sad, they insist on dreaming dreams. However severe Robert Frank’s face appears at first glance, his thin, stern lips set in a hard line, this is not the tight-lipped purse of defeat. And June Leaf, whose own work was often overshadowed by her husband’s—her proud smile suggests she may have been saving her ambitions for a world beyond.

These works, which hint at a future to come, culminate in a procession of fashion pictures that prove beauty’s laws are not inflexible. In another room, Roversi’s commercial campaign for Maison Margiela’s Artisanal Collection 2024 presents formal, spectral portraits of models who themselves look like haughty canvases. Drenched in what feels like moonlight, a silver-screened mist layers their skin and fastidiously spun couture, these polaroids look as if their souls have been frozen in layers of self-respect. One has the sense of a Giovanni Boldini subject devouring its frame—as if the women he painted insisted on triumphing over all imposed boundaries. Roversi’s images demand this same noble unreality. Fashion magazines today are, like the art world, driven by corporate interests, and have long been reduced to insubstantial image making, offering scant resistance to an onslaught of emotional vacuity, dysmorphia, psychic pollution, and buyer’s remorse. Much like cheap fabrics that are used in lieu of those that may uplift the spirit and soothe the skin, fashion photographs promote nothing more than cheap trinkets. But in Roversi’s work, the observer is reminded that there is a science to elegance.

In Kate, Lock Studios, London (2015), a pigment print from an outtake of a W Magazine editorial, Kate Moss stands against what appears to be a rain-soaked wall, her face, neck, arms, and torso dusted in clay. Despite what some might mistake as a dissolved appearance, Roversi’s image calls upon an aristocratic mood that is today nearly extinct. The model’s quality lives not in material display but in her contemptuous gaze: eyes of self-possession which frame a petulant, slightly open mouth. It’s a face befitting a dreamer suggesting an ideal of feminine beauty that rests somewhere between inner peace, privacy, and unimpeachable calm. The adornment of wealth is unnecessary when attitude alone can convey esteem, regality, and a haunting kind of innocence.

Among the exhibition’s thirty-seven offerings, Guinevere for “Blood & Roses”, Studio Luce, Paris (2017), is my favorite. Here, a model is spotlit by celestial radiance, her face tilted heavenward, her diffuse curls reflecting the same state as her expression—remote, dreamy, nothing threatening her serenity. Her limbs are concealed by inky shadows, but her body is armored in rose petals. Studying this image, I was reminded of another memory. My grandmother and I were watching the film version of Tennessee Williams’s novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. There is a scene in which the Contessa, played by the late Anne Bancroft, makes a case for her vicious and mercenary actions: using her social graces to act as a procuress in order to snatch a widow’s fortune. When her artificiality is revealed, she remains indignant: “You cause noble people to go hungry and then tell us how to behave?” It’s a vicious line, but one that animates the hostility that seduces. Acts of beauty, which require severe discipline and austere faith, must be just as menacing as acts of destruction. Though my grandmother lived to be 107, the meditation on beauty she offered remains timeless. For Roversi’s work defends the kind of tranquility that nourishes our interior lives against the forces that threaten to annihilate both beauty and our broader way of life.