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VS: For our second installment, we’ve chosen Lino Lago’s Untitled (Boy with Paint), which can be seen in the Lounge on the first floor of Spangler. We’ve been told that this is the special LoveEdition of the Harbus - so, Rob, where is the love in this painting?
RBN: Well, one of my favorite aspects of this painting is how tender it feels. I always try to sit by it when I am in Spangler because it brings me peace of mind amidst the busyness of HBS life. Onemight expect the juxtaposition of the realistically depicted child and the brash abstract streaks ofcolor to feel more jarring. But the impression I get instead is a peaceful one, of a child asleep anddreaming.
VS: You really do feel the tenderness of the piece from the detailed care with which the boy hasbeen depicted.
RBN: And that’s no accident. I had the chance to catch up with the artist, Lino Lago, the other day by email. It turns out that the painting is of his son, Lukas. Lago told me that the experience ofbeing a father really influenced his process: “I never believed what they say that if you have achild it affects your work but it seems to be truth.” Even the way he has painted Lukas haschanged over time, culminating in this portrait: “I painted him several times,” Lago said. “Mostly Ipainted his eyes. Just his eyes. But this time I made him with closed eyes and it was the lastportrait of him I made.” Lago thinks that painting Lukas with closed eyes lets us access his “ownworld” and “own consciousness.”
VS: The image of Lukas off in his own imaginary world fits in really nicely with the explicitjuxtaposition of abstraction and realism you mentioned earlier. Whereas the boy is depicted in ahyper-realistic manner (Before taking a closer look at the painting, I assumed it was aphotograph!), the bursts of color on the left remind me of the large, loud canvases of the AbstractExpressionists. Ab Ex, as it is frequently referred to, pioneered a type of painting in 1940sAmerica that emphasized the material qualities of paint. In other words, while realist paintingstransform paint into, well, a realistic-looking boy, as in this case, Ab Ex paintings allow paint to besimply paint. This generation of artists looked at the art making process as an intensely personalact, looking inward and tapping into the unconscious parts of their psyches as opposed to lookingoutward for external influences. Their canvases are therefore filled with non-referential streaks ofcolor that represent each artist’s unique struggle with taming, harnessing, or coming to grips withthe irrational side of his mind. When we consider this in light of the Jungian notion of theunconscious--
RBN: It’s always about the Jungian unconscious with you! Let’s try to keep our readers awakeand conscious for once?
VS: I guess what I am trying to say is that I find the idea of the boy’s closed eyes signaling aseparate realm of consciousness particularly intriguing in light of the fact that within the frame liesa style of painting that attributed its existence entirely to that.
RBN: Ah! Now I get it. In fact, this play of abstraction and realism and the mix of opposing stylesand tones is something that Lago explores in many of his works. He described to me how heoften likes to challenge the viewer by bringing “in the work something that seems not fit to it. Asmuch different as much better.” In one series, he painted hyper-realistic scenes of refineddomestic interiors and then assaulted them with a splatter of bright color. In another, he tore oilpaintings in half, hanging one piece on a gallery wall and the other in a random location in New York City, perhaps on an electrical pole or under a bridge. In yet another, he blocked out largesections of classical portraits with brightly-colored squares labeled: “This area is not so important.”
VS: Those are worth taking a look at. Do you think he is asking us to choose between realismand abstraction in these works, forcing us to weigh in on that well-worn debate?
RBN: Well actually, I see it a bit differently. In Lago’s work, this pastiche is not just an act ofwhimsy pitting abstraction against realism. Rather, his works show a profound, postmodernrealism through confrontation with the abstract. Lago is making an honest attempt to depict whatliving in our world looks like and feels like. It reminds me of the way the composer Caroline Shawcombines Baroque musical forms, modern vocal techniques, and the drawings of Sol LeWitt inher amazing Partita: not to show their dissonance, but rather to reveal their coherence as parts ofour experience in today’s world. Seriously, Vicky, you need to listen to this piece right now!
VS: Noted. Shall we bring it back to Lino Lago now?
RBN: Right. So I think this combination of the abstract and the real isn’t asking us to choose oneway of looking at the world—it’s forcing us to recognize that the world we live in today is always abit of both, at the same time. For Lago, “Things are for me as they look in my paintings. Theyhave something else, new. Something unexpected.” Rather than being a dreamlike portrayal inwhich the abstract and the real do not coexist, this juxtaposition is, for Lago, “Something wefound out everyday of our lives (at least me for sure).”
VS: I like this idea of the seeming assault of abstraction across the top of the boy’s head asrepresenting what vision looks like today. If you think about it, we never really do see an object, ora person, in its entirety. For one, our view is generally blocked off by something or someone andso we constantly have to reposition ourselves in order to get a full view. But more importantly, ourvision is often confronted with elements of surprise—whether it is advertisements or web pop-upsconstantly trying to vie for our attention, our view is, in a sense, always fragmented andinterrupted. It is rare that we get the chance to take a sustained look at something. But perhapsthis is precisely where art comes in—the artworks hanging on the walls of campus encourage usto slow down for a moment and take a good look.
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