Dark Church
David McMurray at Linda Hodges Gallery

By Ron Glowen

The notion of Spirituality in modern art has stripped the work of art from its covenant with the institutions and implements of faith, and asks the work to stand alone, bearing an internal mystical beacon. Only in rare cases in recent times (the Rothko Chapel in Houston for instance) does a symbolic exchange of mysteries occur between the artwork and its host. That feeling also arises in the gallery installation of David McMurray's oversized airbrush and ink drawings, in combination with sleekly pristine architectonic structures, at Linda Hodges Gallery. The feeling is perhaps more profane than sacred, but nonetheless, the elements have an impact greater than the sum of, or distilled within, the parts.

The drawings are each roughly six by seven feet. They depict a single composite of a larger-than-life-size nude male, with a blur at the extremities capturing some posture of movement. There is no background, and the space is both flat and infinitely deep: images that suggest the stroboscopic photo experiments of Thomas Eakins or Etienne-Jules Marey (McMurray works meticulously from photographs) and the disturbing transmutation of the flesh seen in the paintings of Francis Bacon, especially as they dominate and overwhelm the viewer from a foregrounded perspective. Each is framed with a wide, flat border. They are grouped in diptych or triptych arrangements with adjacent constructions finished in black lacquer that suggest the function of tabernacles, retablos, or altars, and the combined installations (entitled In Absentia) take on the ambience of a church: a dark church, at that.

The stark construction and commanding scale give the installation a potency at which the drawings alone only hint. The agitation expressed in the figures can be seen and felt as the result of a force more potent than, say, existential anxiety. The tenebrism and scale, but especially the experiential impact, reminds me of Carravagio and the understanding that his provocative paintings were instruments in a powerful Institutional resurgence of faith. (Faithfully and with visual literality embodying the Jesuit concept of the "spiritual exercise," Carravagio's work heralded the militant zeal of the Counter-Reformation.)

Sanctuary is the largest installation grouping, a triptych of drawings with the figures seeming to move outward at the left and right, and toward the viewer at center. These hang above and behind a low narrow table with a recessed compartment that glows from a hidden light source. A row of pyramidal obelisks parallel to the table marks the spatial boundary of the piece. The Substance of Things Hoped For incorporates a dark, plinth-like box and flanking low platforms between the paired drawings. An empty recessed niche in the plinth suggests, but does not contain, the potent symbolic element for which it seems to call. Its reliquary stands empty. The ensembles are ominous and authoritative, and generate a mood of uncertainty. Modernity, rather than institutional spirituality, is more the authority in this case. It is as if to say that modernity is itself the result of a conversion regarding the replacement and displacement of the spiritual.

McMurray's installations underscore the inversion. He applies the previous cult of faith (the Carravaesque) to that of modern rationalism. The mechanistic eye of the camera, the dispassionate technique of photorealistic airbrush and the minimalist sterility of his tabernacles all seem to sanctify the rationalist position. The anonymity of the figures and the ambiguity of their actions project an unsettling psychological sense of disturbance from within the rational framework (as did Carravagio's paintings within the framework of the Counter-Reformist dogma). Inthe end, McMurray's figures are not spiritual at all, but rather the embodiment of pathos and loss.

Artweek, June 23, 1994