Sven Loven And A Rablesian Grotesque, by Adam Lehrer
Adam Lehrer detects the kind of emancipatory grotesque that Mikhail Bahktin found in Rabelais's literature in Sven Loven's paintings
You can’t fool Sven, can you? No. Sven sees you. In you. The real you. The you who hides beneath the surface of your personage, in the shadows of your repressed malevolence. Your ulterior motives. Your insidious desire that compels you to do the thing that you do but justify with your conscious morality (faux or otherwise). The New York-based artist Sven Love isn’t a psychic. He can’t read your thoughts. His gaze, however, penetrates the walls that compose your defense mechanisms. Sven is a soul gazer. A mystic, maybe. A sorcerer? Or, a counter-intelligence operative with a deep understanding of the fact that the faces we show one another don’t reflect the totality of who we are or what drives us. Sven can see who you would be if you felt that you were allowed to be so. He knows what you’re doing. He knows why you’re doing it. Even if you don’t know, he knows. And it is that version of us — the version untethered and unbound to control, ideology, and behavioral orthodoxy — that he renders to canvas so we can see it too. Moreover, he renders it joyously and celebrates its existence. He unburdens us of repression. Rejoice!
No judgement. Like an algorithm, Sven isn’t here to shame you. Instead, he shows you what you already wanted, deep down. What you really are, free of the layers of subjectivity and consciousness walled up around your psyche. In Sven’s paintings, your ego dissolves and the real you lives. The chosen, constructed, self-conscious signifier versus the unencumbered, pre-conscious desire. Sven’s paintings are imbued with that unencumbered, pre-conscious desire. His subjects’ most unconscious and often most joyously demonic tendencies are rendered to the very surfaces of their visages. But, alas – Sven does not scold them. Nigh, he renders those repressed traits effervescently. It’s freedom that happens in these paintings — yours, mine, ours — Sven emancipates us from the trappings of our own egos. In his paintings, we luxuriate in the characteristics that we exert much effort in attempting to keep them secret from ourselves. But why should we be ashamed? In Sven’s paintings, our shame disintegrates; a liberation of the shadow. To be shameless is to be fucking free!
Art history is a control system. It is understood merely through the lens of the powerful institutions that write it. The control system sanitizes its expression, to keep it within a window of preordained behavioral orthodoxy. What is acceptable? What is “tasteful”? It doesn’t matter what, Sven realizes, because such notions are not natural outgrowths of the human spirit, but the cleanly and organized distillations of institutional control. Sven has none of that. He rejects this false pathway of history. Instead, he looks towards the expressions of early Western pictorial painting: angels, demons, good, evil, totems, symbols, and universal sensations. Is it not the noumenon of humanity that is repressed the most by modern institutions? Sven’s glare looks past those controlled systems — those things that compel us to deny our very humanity — and grips the repressed noumenal energy of human beings, dragging them back to the surface. His subjects are full of contradictions — malignancy and benevolence, tragedy and beauty — and they are free. Sven sees the real you. That is, “the you” you would be if you weren’t ideologically bludgeoned into repressing the thing that makes you “the real you.”
“Grotesque” as a descriptor is a loaded word in art discourse. It’s applied to artistic forms that skew disembodied, tangled, malformed, or exaggerated to the point of satire. The great literary critic Mikhail Bahktin corrected the record on “the grotesque.” The grotesque isn’t just satire (and therefore, implicitly negative), theorizes Bahktin in his text on Renaissance writer Francois Rabelais called Rabelais and this World, it is an exaggeration of both the positive and negative attributes of a scene. Bahktin viewed the grotesque exaggeration as nothing less than a profound, spiritual renewal of the subject (or, in Bahktin’s writings, “the word”): “We specify that it is the word that is born, and we stress this fact: a highly spiritual act is degraded and uncrowned by the transfer to the material bodily level of childbirth, realistically represented,” writes the literary critic. “But thanks to degradation the word is renewed.”
This is the kind of grotesque employed by Sven. Through the grotesque exaggeration of human forms, Sven pulverizes the invisible forces that seek to dilute the human being of libidinal expression and freedom itself. This is his occulted X-Ray vision at work. He sees through the control systems of modernism, art history, and the institutions that manufacture them. And what he sees — joyous, exuberant, wild, unhinged, tragic, untamed, and beautiful as it is — can only be accurately rendered through a Rablesian grotesque. It is this liberated other that emanates through Sven’s canvases like a mystic glow.
Hell is Hot and the World is Cold. The world (especially the Western world) is cold, because the world is frigid. Repressed. For all that we endure, we still behave and we do what we’re told. We wear the masks, even if they’re useless we put them on. We wear seat belts. Some of us even vote. All our kinetic energy is frozen over through a disciplined system of coercion. Sven unleashes the heat beneath the surface onto the canvas. In “Embraced by Demons,” a Christ-like figure gets his cock sucked by a monstrous apparition; he’s found ecstasy in the abyss. The unreality of the sequence is heightened by the transparency Sven applies to its figurations. Sven derives some inspiration from the compositions and themes of medieval manuscript art, but the resultant paintings are totally original. Thus, the reference images function less as “source material” in Sven’s paintings than as commentary on the violent and sexualized images of pre-Modernist art acting as creative stimuli. An excess of oblivion becomes a creative spigot. These paintings, quite unlike Sven’s earlier work, feature figurations that are utterly unrecognizable from their sources. They are projections of the artist’s mind’s eye.
For instance, one painting entitled “Democracy” depicts several humanoid figures, awash in Sven’s delirious palette of blues and reds, huddled together close and engaged in some kind of orgiastic ritual of excess. A muscular demon behind a bearded man with nipple clamps. A huge titted fat woman in blue (an overfed bog hag, of sorts) reclines with her arm around a thin, nude mail figure with a hip, Brooklyn “fuck you, Dad!” Flock of Seagulls haircut. To the left of the hipster is a monstrous creature of human body and canine head. A slender nude woman looks awfully similar to the “Naked Athena” of 2020, who presented her body naked to protest the police in Portland (yes, of course Portland).
This is where Sven’s supernatural talent for excavating and showing the shadow dimension is best utilized, you see. From a certain perspective, the painting resembles an image of a protest. “A protest,” you ask, “But these are demonic creatures engaging in orgiastic excess!?” Yes. Is a protest not, at root, a ritualistic expulsion of mass energy? Is this not America circa 2021’s own “Solar Anus” (to use Bataille’s infamous aphorism)? Yes it is. The people crowd into the streets and join hand in hand to expel their excess and pent up rage and libido. Remove the signs, the catchphrases, and the ideologies (manufactured or otherwise), and what you have is an ancient rite. Where the contemporary protest lacks in political usefulness it to a degree compensates for in spiritual release.
This is what Sven sees beneath the system’s veneer. This is what he shows us. And while Bataille says that the world is “purely parodic,” Sven’s paintings are not satire. In “German Intellectual in Hell,” a figure resembling an academic appears to be violently laughing and crying all at once, unleashing a lifetime of suppressed libidinal energy. But we do not laugh at him. On the contrary, Loven demands we bask in the academic’s purgation. We feel it with him. There is no shame in Loven’s scenes. These paintings offer their subjects nothing short of spiritual renewal through the grotesque exaggeration of their repressed negative and positive excess. And it feels good.
NOTE: This text is an elongated and re-edited version of a text that Adam Lehrer contributed to be used by No Gallery for Sven Loven’s recent exhibition “Hell is Hot and the World is Cold”
SOURCES:
1. Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and his World (Indiana University Press, 2009)
2. Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus,” The Anarchist Library, 1931
IMAGES:
1. Sven Loven “Democracy”
2. “German Intellectual in Hell”
3. “Embraced by Demons”
4. “Naked Athena”