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2011 LewAllen Gallery press release:
 
"For decades, Wes Hempel has been committed to reinvisioning the depiction of masculinity in contemporary art.  By setting psychologically acute portraits of modern-day males against backdrops appropriated from such disparate sources as Neoclassical history painting and Dutch Golden Age landscapes, the artist's works forge provocative dialogues between the exigencies of the present and its endowments from the past.


Joining the mythic allusions and technical fluency of classical art together with the ideas of personal narrative and social content of Postmodern art, Hempel's paintings explore the divide between the ancient and modern, reason and passion, august ideals and the profoundly individual.  The artist recasts modern male figures in historical and culturally iconographic settings, provoking both a re-thinking of assumed narratives and mythic themes and inviting a similar reconsideration of contemporary life, masculinity and sexual norms.  Hempel's societal investigations are rendered in sensuously modeled flesh tones, gleaming marble surfaces, and the immersive depth of Arcadian landscapes-- proving as visually seductive as they are conceptually rigorous."

 

 

Artist Statement: Tied to the Past

 

Most of the paintings in the 2009 exhibition continue my longstanding working method of combining art historical elements with contemporary figures. I chose the title "Tied to the Past" (from one of the pieces in the show), in part because the paintings are linked to the past both in their subject matter and their surface qualities. Even when they aren't quoting specific art historical references, the paintings have a traditional look, as if they were produced in another era. The figures, upon close inspection, however, reveal that these are indeed contemporary works.

I've actively cultivated this traditional look for a number of reasons. One of my ongoing projects (which I've written about at length elsewhere) is a re-visioning of what art history might have looked like had homosexuality not been vilified. A walk through any major museum will reveal paintings that depict or legitimate only certain kinds of experience. Despite the good intentions of critical theorists questioning the validity of the canon, paintings of the old masters on the walls of museums like the Met, the Louvre, Rijksmuseum still have a certain cache. They're revered not just for their technique but because they enshrine our collective past experience. Of course, it's a selected past that gets validated. Conspicuously absent to me as a gay man is my own story. By presenting contemporary males as objects of desire in familiar looking art historical settings, I'm able to imagine (and allow viewers to imagine) a past that includes rather than excludes gay experience-and ride the coattails, as it were, of art history's imprimatur. Several of the paintings in this show are working on that level (some rather playfully). For example, the piece titled Auction is an easily recognizable rendition of Jean-Leon Gerome's (1824-1904) painting Slave Auction (c.1884), except I've moved the setting outdoors. And where in the original a nude woman is offered for sale to the crowd, the auctioneer now offers a rope-bound male angel. Similarly, in the piece titled A Breakfast, I've taken the setting of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's (1839-1912) painting Silver Favourites (1903) and replaced the three beautiful maidens with four nude young men. The paintings Breather and Return of Spring (revisions of a Vermeer and Bouguereau, respectively) offer similar exchanges.

Recently, however, I've grown leery of my own use of art historical imagery. The project mentioned above still interests me, and yet the simple substitution of male for female accomplishes only a limited subversion of the original, and the connection to the past feels at times oppressive to me. Other works in the show may be speaking to that growing ambivalence.

-Wes Hempel, 2009

 

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 A New Beginning, 2009, oil on canvas, 44 x 44"

A shirtless young man kneels in the midst of what appears to be an archeological dig. Architectural fragments lie on the ground along with rocks and tools and moved earth. On either side of the figure are excavation pits, though the clean symmetrical lines make them look oddly like graves. To the left of the figure stands an angel, turned away from the viewer, hands over his face. A tornado appears in the sky behind the figures, and above the tornado, in the clouds, we see a small tableau of figures: a man sitting on a cloud, flanked by winged cherubs. It's not clear what prayer is being offered by the kneeling youth, though in conjunction with the title, we might assume he desires a fresh start of some kind, a break with the past (represented by the recently excavated antiquities), forgiveness, perhaps, renewal. Other elements in the painting may hint that realizing such a change will not be easy. Is the angel standing beside the youth weeping? If so, are these tears of joy or dismay? The figure perched in the clouds-ostensibly a representative of heaven-looks down not at the praying youth, but rather off to the side. Is his expression one of concern? Compassion? Sadness? The tornado, literally a collision of opposing air masses, churns ominously in the background.

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 How About Now, 2009, oil on canvas, 28 x 22"

The setting here is a take-off on a Dutch interior by Vermeer. Emptied of seventeenth century objects and figures, the room now contains a single strapping youth with a brown paper bag over his head. Standing in a pair of boxer briefs, he gives a thumbs-up with one hand, while holding a handwritten sign in the other. Behind him is a framed black and white photograph of a smiling boy. Is the standing figure the same person as the boy? Does he intend by holding the sign that a comparison be made between who he was as a child and the chiseled man he's become? And what are we to make of the bag over his head? If the eyes are the windows of the soul, are we being invited to evaluate him based not on his intelligence or personality but rather on his beefcake physique? Can we speculate that some wound suffered by the boy has now been bandaged with post-adolescent muscularity? Of course, the sign could also be read literally: how about attending to the now, the present, instead of being obsessed with the past.

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 Farewell 3, Farewell 5, 2009, oil on canvas, each 18 x 36"

The Farewell Series:

These paintings are imaginary images of nature showing little or no influence of humankind. The word "Farewell" affixed prominently in the center of the images may speak to the loss of pristine environment to commercial development or pollution. But I was also thinking in more personal terms about the relatively short span of a human life and what it feels like, as one ages, to begin saying good-bye to a world one loves. In this sense then, the paintings may function as Memento Mori, a kind of elegiac glance back.

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 Tied to the Past, 2009, oil on canvas, 48 x 44"

A contemporary youth stands in the foreground, head tilted down, staring at the ground. His hands appear to be tied behind his back. A leather strap crossing his forearms extends into the landscape behind him. As the background is largely comprised of an art historical source-British artist William Mulready's (1786-1863) Near the Mall, Kensington Gravel Pits (1812-13)-the figure can be seen as literally "tied to the past." Metaphorically, of course, the painting may raise questions of what role our individual and/or collective pasts have in shaping our present lives. To quote a recent Art in America article that quotes Marx, "'the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.' Not only do present-day interests largely determine which aspects of the past are reclaimed, but previous political and artistic dominance tends to limit elements of that past available for retrieval." (Paul Mattick, Art in America, June/July 2009, p. 57)

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 Sye's Dream, 2008, oil on canvas, 72 x 44"

Although this painting doesn't incorporate art historical sources directly, Sye's Dream owes a debt compositionally to the Louvre's St. Sebastian (1480) of Andrea Mantegna (c.1431-1506).  Mantegna's Sebastian is tied among antique ruins to a raised column.  Two archers are seen in the lower right hand corner.  Following this structure, I placed my model Sye on the roof of a building against a brick chimney, with a skateboard at his feet.  In place of the two archers are two youths who appear to be involved in a whispered commentary.  What is the subject of their conversation?  Are they admiring the heroic figure above them, ridiculing him?  Behind the figures, an imaginary, dreamlike pastoral scene unfolds.

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MEMORY BUREAU, oil on canvas, 44" x 44" 

In a number of my paintings, buildings float in the sky above a landscape or ocean. I find myself, as I am engaged in the painting process, constructing narratives around this imagery, and I like to hear of viewers who respond to the finished work by inventing stories of their own. Common threads do exist. The most human of objects, buildings can symbolize many things: home, family, shelter, safety, human creativity and ingenuity. I think the picture of a house floating in the sky can be arresting precisely because a tension often exists between our idealization of these elements and the more mundane experiences of our everyday lives. In this regard, the paintings may give voice to our strivings. The houses may speak to our desires to push ahead toward some goal that is just out of reach, yet close, not unattainable.