| There is something unsettling in Lordan Bunch’s recent paintings at Schroeder Romero. His painstaking reproductions of tombstone photographs are, on one level, a tribute to the dead and to grieving. He performs a ritual remembering that is likely to survive longer and travel further than the original memorial photos ever could. The photorealistic details of the women that he paints—a wisp of hair bobby-pinned back, the trace of a scar, the healthy paunch of fat collecting just below the chin—offer something definitive to grasp at, something concrete that has been lost. |  |
Lordan Bunch “Proof of Mary” – Heather Harvey
There is something unsettling in Lordan Bunch’s recent paintings at Schroeder Romero. His painstaking reproductions of tombstone photographs are, on one level, a tribute to the dead and to grieving. He performs a ritual remembering that is likely to survive longer and travel further than the original memorial photos ever could. The photorealistic details of the women that he paints—a wisp of hair bobby-pinned back, the trace of a scar, the healthy paunch of fat collecting just below the chin—offer something definitive to grasp at, something concrete that has been lost.
That some of the work is painted on mass-produced Ouija boards suggests a society more comfortable seeking answers from pop culture than from religion, science or philosophy.
Unexpectedly, the Ouija does offer a meaningful metaphor, becoming a reductive map upon which one can trace out the “big questions,” despite the impossibility of receiving satisfying answers. The elementary school quality of the alphabet and numbers (“A, B, C . . .1, 2, 3”) suggests a child-like bafflement at death’s impenetrability. The “YES” and “NO” become an equivocating acknowledgment of the inevitable. The bold “GOOD BYE” at the base of each board punctuates death’s finality.
The tragic, nostalgic elements of Bunch’s work could quickly descend into sentimentality. But Bunch, more a cultural observer than a direct participant in mourning, reveals a complicated thought process that keeps the work fascinating. He is concerned with the unattainable—unanswerable questions, unbridgeable gaps and unsatisfied longing. His artistic process itself is a metaphor for impossibility. Bunch sets himself up for failure by enlarging his paintings beyond the original source photographs, while simultaneously working in a tight, photorealistic style. One series in the show incorporates his repeated attempt to faithfully enlarge one woman’s tiny photo to human scale. The subtle variations in otherwise indistinguishable paintings create a slightly sinister feel, suggestive of human cloning or parallel universes. Interestingly, his work has analogies to “upsampling” in Photoshop (to extrapolate missing pixels from existing ones) as well as history and anthropology (to create a plausible narrative from sparse, often mystifying facts).
His subjects, all youngish women, read as archetypes: lover, mother, daughter, virgin, sister, aunt. The full complexities of their lives are obscured by these roles. Some women play their part gracefully. Others wear their awkwardness even into the afterlife. Bad haircuts, imperfect beauty and slightly haggard looks hint at the untold aspects of their lives. These not-quite-beautiful women open up cracks between here and there, then and now, them and us. They are as unresolved as we are. They remain unfinished for all eternity and embody our own worst fears: to be flawed and forgettable. Their lives seem to follow no clear trajectory. They were just here for a while, and then were not.
