The Looking Glass Self #1

Title: The Looking Glass Self #1
Artist: Forrest Solis
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: Height x Width x Depth: 26" x 20" x 3.5"

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About the Artist: I am a figure painter. The human figure has always been an important element in my work. From my earliest experimentations with painting, I have relied on the figure for inspiration, and though my painting has changed and developed over time, the human figure remains my central preoccupation, and continues to pose new challenges. I have always been intrigued by body language, and my paintings are an exploration of how gesture and expression can combine with formal elements to create metaphors for the human condition. My thematic source material is varied, incorporating elements of Freud's notions of the uncanny, along with ideas drawn from Lacan, Jung, Bakhtin and the South American literature of magical and grotesque realism. My thematic source material is varied, incorporating elements of Freud’s notion of the uncanny, along with Lacan, Jung, Bakhtin and the South American literature of magical and grotesque realism.

My paintings challenge the status quo of visual reality, and I that find a quote from the introduction of An Anthology of Magical Realist Fiction written by David Young and Keith Hollaman explains my rationale. Young and Hollaman write: “One way to understand ‘magical realism’ is as a kind of pleasant joke on ‘realism,’ suggesting as it does a new kind of fiction, produced in reaction to the confining assumptions of realism, a hybrid that somehow manages to combine the ‘truthful’ and ‘verifiable’ aspects of realism with ‘magical’ effects we associate with myth, folktale, tall story, and that being in all of us- our childhood self, perhaps- who loves the spelI casts even when it is perfectly implausible.” Mirroring the absurdity of contemporary logic, I strive to represent this quintessentially modern sense of instability in my work, through creating images that are disorienting, visually confusing and that evoke a sense of being grounded in reality without being quite real.

I am fascinated by aspects of childhood, particularly the dreams, stories and creative possibilities associated with that stage of growth. Unlike adults, children do not distinguish between the inanimate and the animate, but through play imbue inanimate objects with life; a level of creativity that expires as they age. I strive to bring that level of childlike creative freedom to my work, and through such transformations, reversals and inversions, draw upon the rich traditions of the carnivalesque. Russian nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary scholar David K. Danow Ph.D. explains that “for Bakhtin, the carnivalesque-grotesque finds its raison d’etre in its ability ‘to consecrate inventive freedom, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world and offer the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.’” Concurrent with this, I introduce the idea of paradox into my work, which then stands as a hybrid of opposing forces. I create images of absurd situations that are completely grounded in reality, thus forcing the viewer to question his or her conceptions of what is, in fact, real.

The ‘uncanny’, according to Freud, arouses initial feelings of fright or terror before revealing a sense of comfort in familiarity. E. Jentsch, as cited by Freud, states as an impetus of the uncanny affect, “doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate.” I attempt to aesthetically and conceptually draw from this idea of the uncanny. In my paintings, I enjoy arranging inanimate objects in such a way they are given the appearance of life. Through altering gesture and expression, I try to suppress the life of the figure, and push to create a marionette-like, Chaplin-esque quality in the figures—to, as Miriam Hansen writes of the silent film icon, “chop up expressive body movement into a sequence of minute mechanical impulses…render(ing) the law of the apparatus visible as the law of human movement.”

In my paintings I often structure spaces as though in a kind of dialogue with Modernist traditions, though my Modernist spaces are populated by the irrational, and illogical, relying on a more Post-Modern sensibility. Using multiple mirrors, I fragment the space and create simultaneous viewpoints and shifting planes. These elements together produce a sense of movement and time, and because the mirrors remain unexplained, the time and space represented is ambiguous.† This uncertainty is representative of a psychological time and space, formed of fragmented childhood memories and adult desires where the past, present and future collide.† By fragmenting the space and playing with traditional ideas about visual gravity, I create compositional instability, subverting the idea of a “fixed” image. In fact, my goal, through combining spatial inversions where figures are simultaneously upside-down and right-side-up with flatly painted optical illusions, is to incite a physical response from the viewer. We live in an unstable time, and the depiction of an idealized distilled moment in time is inappropriate and dishonest.

I also enjoy the element of intellectual uncertainty when painting the figure. I use mirrors to confuse the viewer as to which figure is “real” and which is the reflection, even going so far as to force the viewer to communicate with the reflection. Freud discusses how the fantasy of the double or multiplicity with young people is evidence of the ego and desire for eternal life, and for adults, that same image becomes a harbinger of death. In The Uncanny, he writes, “It is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self.”

The mutability of identity is highly intriguing to me. The idea of costume and masquerade enables the release of powerful feelings otherwise contained within fixed social behaviors and challenges the idea of a stable unified Self, which I also attempt through subject multiplication. Claude Cahun beautifully articulated this sentiment in her book Aveux non avenus: “Make myself another vocabulary, brighten the silver of the mirror, blink and eye, swindle myself by means of a fluke muscle; cheat with my skeleton, correct my mistakes, divide myself in order to conquer, multiply myself in order to assert myself; briefly, to play with ourselves can change nothing.”

Finally, there is a rich self-reflexive history behind female portraiture that I find fascinating. I often represent the female perspective as characteristically doubled, both looking and looked at, collapsing the subject/object relationship. I embrace female subjectivity by intertwining my internal and external selves and assuming control of the viewer's gaze. Through these methods, I have found painting the female figure to be a uniquely empowering process.†Often I appear, in a "Hitchcockian" manner, within these paintings, allowing me to achieve a satisfying level of meta-fictive storytelling.† I feel that I am investigating the idea of the voyeur, and confronting myself as the viewer.† Because I am reflected back into the painting, the idea that the viewer is looking through my eyes is solidified. The viewer has been invited into my self-absorbed conversation.