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When you meet him in person, you’ll probably find him to be a friendly, amenable, even funny young man. (I did; I thought he was charming.) You’ll find out he lives quietly in Nashville with his wife, that he works hard on his art and has a good deal of friends; that he doesn’t like to drink and even shies away from coffee. In the various imagined realities that his paintings, drawings and, now, photographs inhabit, however, Scarborough wears the mantle of some old-school Victorian mad scientist, á la Drs. Frankenstein and Moreau: a vivisectionist of the human body executing his evil experiments on the people in his artworks. |
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When you meet him in person, you’ll probably find him to be a friendly, amenable, even funny young man. (I did; I thought he was charming.) You’ll find out he lives quietly in Nashville with his wife, that he works hard on his art and has a good deal of friends; that he doesn’t like to drink and even shies away from coffee. In the various imagined realities that his paintings, drawings and, now, photographs inhabit, however, Scarborough wears the mantle of some old-school Victorian mad scientist, á la Drs. Frankenstein and Moreau: a vivisectionist of the human body executing his evil experiments on the people in his artworks. The experience of viewing the work can be unsettling at times, but it is a satisfying and frequently amusing affair.
In his latest series, it is the question of the nature of physical beauty, and of its relation to grotesquery, that comes to the fore through the prism of Japanese anime. Recently on display at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta, Scarborough’s first photographic works are an extension of a series of drawings on which he is also currently at work, wherein the features of the people he chooses as models are distorted to resemble the various “types” in the dominant Japanese cartooning style of manga and anime. This odd, exaggerated caricature, with its inventory of repeated traits—the enormous eyes, glissading cheek and nose lines and the tiny, elongated necks and limbs on slender, disproportionate bodies—has long been recognized and established in the East and is increasingly so in the West as a collection of tropes meant to serve as a stylized representation of “cuteness” and jejune beauty.
Working with a collection of different computer programs, each specialized for different aspects of the technique, Scarborough is working with a painter’s sense of color and volume to move pixel-by-pixel through the landscape of his subjects’ bodies and faces, arriving at distorted and unreal figures that nonetheless establish themselves confidently in this reality. Because they successfully retain their identity as photographs, they engage as depictions of real people; because they take those stylized features out of their accepted context and into our three dimensions, they unnerve and discomfort us. Scarborough has grounded his distortions both in reality and according to an established set of rules, but with context removed as to how we should properly “read” them. We see only the figures themselves, with distortions that are not all immediately obvious; we see them as sickly, off-kilter, malformed or in some other sense unwell. Scarborough has succeeded, remarkably, at highlighting the razor-thin line that stands between physical attraction and revulsion.
The oeuvre of the 30-year-old artist is remarkably varied, especially for one so young; Scarborough is one of those naturally gifted technicians who seems to enjoy trying on new styles and techniques with each successive body of work. Taken as a whole, however, we find a consistent obsession with the human body, the skin we’re in—how we perceive and are perceived through the physical, and how close beauty stands to deformity. The artist is continually driven to stretch, remold, warp, distort and batter the human body. Scarborough has painted portraits of toy baby dolls with eerily real-looking skin, smashed and scattered like hard plastic in places, yet simultaneously twisting and stretching into alien, tentacled flesh in others. He has made paintings depicting accident victims in the midst of horrific vehicle crashes, frozen in crisp, agonizing detail at the moment of impact. One of my favorite series is the one in which he posed friends and family members in “history paintings” depicting scenes of real-life incidents of injury to their persons: scenes which Scarborough himself had never witnessed, but composed based on his impressions of the descriptions the subjects give him when they told him about the accidents.
It must be said, however, since it might not be obvious otherwise, that the nature of these works is not so dark as the description might lead one to expect. Rather than the tortured, agonizing nihilism of an artist like Francis Bacon, there is a mediated sense of wit in these works, carried out with a full and often bright color palette that is all much more in line with an ironist like John Currin. There’s a sublime sense of humor in Scarborough’s works that is almost god-like in its execution. Although seemingly without any compunction against putting his characters in such uncanny and intricate peril, there is a tenderness there that displays a sympathy to his creations that cannot be denied.
This is handily evident in the new photographs. Though the process of distorting facial and bodily features is extensive, Scarborough has managed to retain the laconic, bemused expressions that must have been worn by the subjects—for the most part, close friends and family members—in the original photographs. What we’re left with is portraits of visibly abnormally featured men and women who look with open expressions to the camera or out into space without a trace of anxiety in their eyes. In the world Scarborough has created, through the small window we see, what has happened to them is acceptable; the world is as it is and it is bearable. It seems strange to label such an active demolitionist an “optimist;” as it turns out, though, this is secretly the key to understanding Chris Scarborough’s work as a whole.
