Twilight's Last Gleaming
Twilight’s
Last Gleaming: on the Art of Lena Viddo
“Skepticism is the beginning of
faith.” —Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray
Lena Viddo depicts a synthetic netherworld
where wonderland and wasteland fuse, a world neglecting to conceal the violence
through which it is maintained, a violence entailing the degradation—equally seductive
and catastrophic—of humanity and nature.
In such a world—a stark reflection of our own—nature is commodified,
forming in several works props for doe-eyed fashion models. In “Swanography” one such imaginary model is
draped with dead swans, the leg of one of which (presumably) she is eating. Other models are surrounded by ostriches, oversize
bees, or collared monkeys, while still another clutches a muzzled lapdog to her
bosom.
While some of her paintings are
contemporary interpretations of classical portraits by (for example) da Vinci,
Bronzino, or Botticelli, Viddo seems more akin in spirit (if less so in style)
to Hieronymus Bosch. Mostly young women,
the subjects of these works appear in varying states of surreal distortion, or disintegration
even (as in “Venus, Folly, Cupid, and Time”). Whether surrounded by exotic animals, birds,
insects, or fish, or swimming about while sipping from the muck they’re mired
in (“Call Me Ishmael”), these figures’ bulbous gaze remains fixed on that to
which they’re enslaved: the viewer, that
anonymous voyeur behind the lens these portraits imply, an omnipresent nobody
whose shoes we momentarily fill.
The loping exaggeration of their eyes suggests
these figures’ sentimentality and monotonous voluptuousness. Recalling with a mordant twist the iconic (Margaret
D. H.) “Keane kids” paintings of the 1960s, these saucer-eyed youths have seen
too much, and been undefended from the magnitude of that vision. Hence the smoke drizzling from the hole where
one model’s third eye should be (“Kiss Me Deadly”). In all, such works conjure a lurid splendor
attending the universal decay to which these subjects appear so blissfully inured.
Other works feature animals parading
as people, or rather people parading as the beasts they’ve made of themselves. Like the jewelry-sporting tiger in “Gold
Standard” or the osculating horses in “Love Strong,” these creatures are fierce
in the colloquial and conventional senses: preternaturally keen and alluring, as well as
carnal and vicious, befitting their role as figurations of ego and appetite. The paintings comprising “Sexy Beast Diptych”
each show a tiger in mid-roar, the sinews of their maws rendered with a fractal
specificity bordering on abstraction. “Mating
Game,” meanwhile, features a writhing tangle of opalescent vipers, some looking
almost personable as they peer from the mass into which they’ve knotted
themselves.
Among Viddo’s largest paintings, “No
Religion” marks a culmination of the artist’s aesthetic. The work features a recumbent female nude in a
plush landscape of cushions and phantasmal flora, including phallic squash tipped
by gem-like eyes. Strange vines twist
about, along with a wire leading to a studio lamp aimed at the nude’s face…which
is that of a rabbit, its gaze wantonly meeting our own, its cascading locks referencing
Botticelli’s Venus, and its overall appearance suggesting a soft-porn amalgam
of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and White Rabbit.
Its pastel palette muting such imagery’s lushness, the painting displays
(upper background) pink and purple rays splaying skyward, as if from the sun, which
itself appears blocked—or replaced—by a pumpkin-like cushion like those on
which the model reclines, her legs poised with a sexual nimbleness all the more
awkward for its blatancy. From another
cushion meanwhile (lower right) several pins protrude.
Other imagery includes flowers, crystals,
a large beetle, and pellucid spherical growths recalling grapes, tubers, or
tumors. While across the top of the work
stretches a strand of barbed wire intersecting a hamsa (an apotropaic symbol featuring an eye on a hand) that’s nailed
to a post behind the model. Other
religious symbolism includes part of the cabalistic Tree of Life diagram near
the model’s right hand, and the various symbols on the pendants dangling from her
pearl ankle bracelet.
Such proliferation of visual elements
suggests a congested, even sickly sumptuousness recalling the nauseating point
at which the marvels of a psychedelic experience turn “bad,” as though they had
hidden some ugly secret all along, one into which they had only served to lure
us. And it is at such an intimation that
Viddo’s work can freeze the viewer, refusing us the easy comforts of the syncretic
pseudo-spirituality this work lampoons, which adds up to what the title of the
painting puts bluntly: no (genuine)
religion whatsoever. Thus is this theriocephalic
nude captured in the asininity marking her relinquishment of her humanity,
along with any appreciation of the sacred beyond its potential as a fashion
accessory. Emblematic of our porn-obsessed
culture, she is our cultural goddess, both beast and whore.
Unsparing satires of the cult of
glamour, Viddo’s paintings function as visual allegories of our apocalyptic
moment. Their sardonic wrath is an
aesthetic antidote to the New Age-ism, post-humanism, and self-help platitudes
employed to buffer us from reality’s direness, including our present nature as
a society. The allure of Viddo’s work
stems from its audacious reflection of that nature, from its forming a circus
mirror in which we may accurately behold our shadow, narcissists even—or especially—in
the presence of our secret face.
All this speaks to what is vital in Viddo’s
portrayals of our noir, our grand guignol,
or (recalling Wilde) the pictures aging poorly in our collective attics. For they evince that fury indicative of the
genuine sacred which, still being capable of outrage, alone distinguishes the
profane, allowing us to endure our reflection from that place within us still
capable of recognizing it.
—Tom
Breidenbach (Feb. 2017 )