| At his first solo show in New York at Freight and Volume, Kent Dorn’s paintings sit somewhere between horror and beauty. His canvases are a personal approximation of the sublime, painting portraits of drifters and outsiders interpreted as lepers or apparitions. These displaced souls are sometimes undressing, doing mysterious things in a somber landscape littered by detritus. In Dorn’s show, “Remains,” old cars and mushrooms make an appearance, as well as some human sculls, graffiti, a cabin, dead birds, and a folk guitarist. |  |
“There are hallucinatory mounds of paint piled on top of nicely-drawn but loose backgrounds with some collaged photographic elements of eyes and faces. Colored pushpins add a spatial element. It is difficult for me to describe them as paintings, they function more as sculptural reliefs.”
Dorn, Kent, Van/Hideaway 2, 2010. Mixed media on canvas, 45 x 69 in.
Kent Dorn, “Remains”
James Gillispie
¬“When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at a certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful … ”
-Edmund Burke, “Of the Sublime” A Philosophical Enquiry”
At his first solo show in New York at Freight and Volume, Kent Dorn’s paintings sit somewhere between horror and beauty. His canvases are a personal approximation of the sublime, painting portraits of drifters and outsiders interpreted as lepers or apparitions. These displaced souls are sometimes undressing, doing mysterious things in a somber landscape littered by detritus. In Dorn’s show, “Remains,” old cars and mushrooms make an appearance, as well as some human sculls, graffiti, a cabin, dead birds, and a folk guitarist. Mostly there are young people in the woods getting lost or intoxicated, or both. This show is somewhere between a suburban nightmare and trip in the woods. There is a sense of searching here for some revelatory experience, however I am left with more a feeling of nostalgia.
There are hallucinatory mounds of paint piled on top of nicely drawn but loose backgrounds with some collaged photographic elements of eyes and faces. Colored pushpins add a spatial element. It is difficult for me to describe them as paintings, they function more as sculptural reliefs. It seems that they sometimes mistakenly drift into diorama territory when there is so much disconnect from surface of canvas to piles of paint. There is an obvious connection between Dorn and other contemporary painters, like Kim Dorland and Allison Schulnik. The use of massive amounts of paint is an effective device, although I am sometimes a little suspicious of this. This is undoubtedly where Dorn’s paintings shine through, giving them an edge.
In Down By The River, there is a river scene with two handfuls of figures. Some of these figures are bathing naked, others seem to just be backpacking through. There is a vague wash of memory here. In Van/Hideaway 2, a burned-out old van that could have belonged to retired kidnappers sits on cinderblocks awaiting its next victims. The paintings of mushrooms held my attention the longest because they function best as painting, and this is where I can see the process of paint taking hold. Throughout the entire show the color is muted, using a tonal palette with the occasional walloping of yellow for the sun or the moon. In Through The Woods 1, there is an effect of looking through the canopy of treetops at the sun, with beams of light carrying through the composition.
Overall there are more questions here, for the viewer, than there are answers. This is a good thing to see at a first solo show. I wish there was more inconsistency, however. The oppositional elements, like thick paint on washy thin surface tend to even each other out. Regardless, Dorn has a real command of the psychological, with his haunting portraits of vagrants and outsiders drifting in and out a landscape that somehow captures the moment of contemporary youth. Perhaps it’s all the flannel. I look forward to seeing how he progresses as a painter and I hope he can maintain that tenuous distance in which we still have delight when looking at something horrendous.
