DORON LANGBERG

‘Touch is what brings these figures into being, whether it’s touch between lovers of many years or complete strangers, old friends or eager acquaintances...’ – hannah baer

Doron Langberg’s intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity, forging a relationship between interior and exterior realities and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by one another. In these new large-scale works Langberg develops a range of thematic and pictorial concerns, chiefly the dynamic interplay between people and the spaces they inhabit. Titled after queer New York parties and club nights–such as _Merge _and Wrecked–the spaces in these paintings are worlds in themselves, sites of multiple layers and levels of experience and connection. Together, the works create a narrative arc that follows the course of an evening, a night out becoming the morning after as we move from _Basement _to Sunrise.

Langberg’s paintings often dissolve certainties of form between individual bodies and between bodies and their surroundings. Orchestrating multiple figures, as well as details of textiles, clothing, interior patterns and aspects of nature he builds compositions in which figures–seen here dancing, cruising, reclining, embracing–appear to move in or out of focus, emerging from or receding into their surroundings, at times declarative, at times spectral. Areas of a painting might appear emphatic or consciously indeterminate, leaving passages of abstraction: gaps, questions – or breathing spaces–that lend the work a more speculative emotional register.

Light in these paintings plays an especially active role; multi-directional, describing the hypnotising effects of strobe or fog machine, it also signals less tangible sources–the heightened, erotic atmosphere of a night out, or the collective energy that builds from a gathering of people. Time stretches within and between works. Declarative instants of euphoric crescendo coexist with hazier, moments, perhaps indicative of more fleeting encounters.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by hannah baer, who writes, ‘Touch is what brings these figures into being, whether it’s touch between lovers of many years or complete strangers, old friends or eager acquaintances, gripping a lithe waist to thrust into him or gently taking his hand to help guide him on the path over the scrubby woods on the edge of a queer beach enclave... The touching here is less the lonely touch of trying to escape individual subjectivity and more the smeared touch of individuality already flickering, the sense that the so-called ‘subjects’ are sharing something larger and more whole than individual experience.’