Masterpieces worn like memories
Louis Eisner is an artist who makes paintings, drawings, and sculptures. His paintings, especially, tend to fall on the classical end of the “perverted realism” spectrum, to use a term coined by Barry Schwabsky. They are often cartoonish and antique, slippery and harrowing. The artist rarely leaves things to chance. Even his abstract works that look gestural draw on pictorial or conceptual source material. Eisner’s work has been exhibited across a wide variety of contexts, from institutions in Europe to laundromats in Wyoming.
I spoke to Eisner in tandem with his solo exhibition, Puzzled Panther, at Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland. The show brings together paintings on canvas and copper plates from sources old and new: masterpieces rendered as remembered textbook pages, margins and all, and home printouts of his own distorted photographs, reproduced by hand down to the printer’s drag lines and color separation. Each image is built in black and white, then glazed with transparent color once dry to combine subjects and methods both old and new, premeditated and incidental. Together the works address how the canonical and the personal become one and the same.
Addis Goldman: Why is the show called Puzzled Panther?
Louis Eisner: Puzzled Panther is from the title of one of the paintings in the show—the one of my brother on a sofa. But the title itself comes from the lyrics of a song by the punk band the Germs. The lead singer, Darby Crash, wrote them, and they make almost no sense, especially when he’s singing them, as seen famously in The Decline of Western Civilization, where he performs it.
AG: I’ve never seen that, but I should. I’m sure your brother is glad he got center billing.
LE: My brother is very elusive and panther-like, so he wasn’t too stoked on the painting. But that’s okay. I wanted him to inhabit the show, really. He’s like a spectral protagonist.
AG: If I look at that painting formally, his cheetah-print T-shirt, if you crop it, looks like an Édouard Vuillard abstraction. But that’s neither here nor there. What’s this show all about?
LE: The show is about being confused. The work is very personal; the images, especially the works on canvas, come from my own life. There’s something autobiographical and diaristic about the work. Time moves forward so ruthlessly, and trying to capture the experience of living is difficult because it’s so elusive. While I was making the show, a kind of Proustian thing happened when I fell asleep on the couch while reading an old copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, translated by Robert Thurman, who had just died. I woke up to the smell of the old book pages because the book was lying on my chest, and the smell of the pages—a sweet, vanilla smell of decay—was very strong. It really reminded me also of the smell of rain. There was something so comforting about the decay but also a sense of renewal. It really made me pause and think about recognition and obliviousness. I think the show is about that.
AG: What’s the painting of the green room about? That’s based on a photo you took, right?
LE: Yeah, it is. I like the idea of an empty room being the subject of a painting. I’ve made a few paintings like that. Empty rooms are places where memories are stored. Lives have been lived in these places, and perhaps new life will someday inhabit it or maybe not. This is the largest painting in the show, and being an interior painting, it has an immersive effect. It draws you in.
AG: This painting makes me think of nineteenth-century ideas about the bourgeois interior. There’s an idea, maybe from Walter Benjamin, about interiors being the étui, the casing of the private individual, the shell where you leave your traces.
LE: Yeah. With this painting I’m trying to capture the idea of contingency and nostalgia. The between reality where something has just happened and something is also just about to happen.
AG: You work from your own images. You studied art history in college. Are the copper plates based on your own textbooks from back in the day?
LE: The copper plates are trompe l’œil pages. They’re not actual textbook pages; they’re “imagined” ones. I’ve selected images of paintings I really love, and maybe the pages in the textbooks I have them in aren’t exactly what I want to reproduce, so I change them.
AG: How are you doing that? There are two different but similar processes going on for both the paintings on canvas and the copper plates.
LE: It all starts with photography. I take pictures, then manipulate them in Photoshop with various tools with no real intention other than to see if I can make them more interesting. Sometimes it’s successful, sometimes not. Paul Gauguin talks about how he would not manipulate but mutilate his subjects. I love the idea of taking that liberty.
AG: These works don’t seem too mutilated, at least to the naked eye.
LE: Some are more than others, but they are all altered, whether it’s the chromatic qualities, the color values, or literally removing appendages, like in the painting of my brother. I paint from printouts, so all the flaws of that technology come with it. And the paintings themselves are made the old way. I’m painting—technically speaking—the same way Raphael did five hundred years ago. I render each image in black and white first, and once that underpainting is dry, I glaze the color on top, layer by layer. So the pictures go through all these transitions and acquire real depth. They look like colorized Technicolor images. There’s something almost kitschy about the surface treatment. A lot of my paintings have this same kind of look to them.
AG: These methods really do capture something that’s hard to replicate, like how cinema cameras capture sunlight on water.
LE: Beyond the surface treatment, I also think the book pages, especially, have a cartoonish quality to them that’s also a recurring feature of my work. There’s always an element of satire, or a kind of cheekiness, involved in representing something with the intent to deceive. And there’s a certain kind of humor involved in achieving the likenesses of these images and then making it look like a book page, which has no real intrinsic value. In that way, there’s a lowbrow quality to the copper-plate paintings.
AG: Absolutely, but nobody should fool themselves: these are difficult paintings to paint. Either way, questions about authenticity and aura never go out of style, especially today.
LE: There’s meaningful differences in terms of how artists engage with ideas of reproduction and appropriation. Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, for example, are famous for pirating imagery, and they want that transgressive act to be legible as a performative element of their work. I don’t quite think I do. When I reproduce a canonical image, I feel like I become its original author. There’s no distance there. Again, there’s something deeply personal about the show, and objectively so: here are pictures from my everyday life, and here are pages I’ve torn out of art-history books.
AG: It’s hard to just say as an artist: These are my paintings; they are inspired by my life. They are part and parcel of my life.
LE: There’s that, and there’s also just a sincere desire for intimacy and immersion, even if the work is somewhat cerebral. There’s a Wallace Stevens poem, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm.” The opening few lines read, “The house was quiet and the world was calm. / The reader became the book. . . . / The words were spoken as if there was no book.” This is what I actually want: that corporeal state where there’s no page between you and the meaning, where the reader just becomes the book.
AG: It’s easy to get bogged down by history. We are filled with knowledge of culture but have no culture at all, Friedrich Nietzsche said. I think what you’re saying moves in that direction. The point is that our own experience of history should be generative in some meaningful way and that we should guard against antiquarianism.
LE: I look at archetypes—The Entombment of Christ by Titian, for instance—and see them as my own, as every individual should, I think, see them as their own and also see themselves in the work. The puzzled panther, at the end of the day, is just me going through the world, totally fucking confused—like we all are.
Louis Eisner: Puzzled Panther is on view at Bernheim Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland, until November 28.