Pre Paris

 The displacement of psychic energy is a salient characteristic of the primary process, which governs the system of the unconsciousness. As a virtually objective correlative to this idea of the free displacement of psychic energies, the intense physicality of Cecily Brown’s paintings can be seen as emblematic of the exhibition’s theme. In this world of fragmented vitality, built of interleaving brushstrokes, Brown reserves an interior space for extravagance in opposition to repressive force. Sergej Jensen’s, Untitled (Bad Dreams), uses a similar density of layered figuration, only to reveal the dreamwork’s critical play in the substitution of a carpet fragment for the painter’s craft.

Wilhelm Sasnal, Thilo Heinzmann, and Eberhard Havekost all engage the inherent tensions between masking and revealing form as subject. Heinzman’s Heinze appropriates the naked form of the classic haystack armature as a standing sculpture, its spiked arms recalling the inherent dangers of support systems. Sasnal’s painting of strobe lights characteristically withholds in his search for a meaningful subject to paint. The surface of Havekost’s Minus 2 Meter 2, is unheimlich in its luxuriant depiction of a folded blanket that is also a veiled and masked surface.

In works by Charline von Heyl, Tom Burr, and Jacqueline Humphries, the specter of physicality is evoked through subtle reference to constraint, loss, and desire. Von Heyl, in the very title of her painting Idolores, achieves a Verschiebung that resounds throughout the formal dislocations of the object. Suggestions of confinement and loss echo through Burr’s triptych of pinned t-shirts.

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