Bob Thompson’s “The Carriage” Riffs on Poussin, with Dark Implications – RisePEI

Bob Thompson’s vibrant scenes resonate with an unplaceable familiarity, recalling canonical Western work however with extra dreamlike and largely inscrutable narratives. Monsters, featureless figures, jazz musicians, and processions of animals change spiritual figures; references to modern occasions infiltrate mythological tales; daring, flat planes of colour summary practical classical compositions. Below Thompson’s hand, a Fra Angelico composition of a beheading turns into the scene of a lynching, and Nina Simone inhabits a Gauguin-esque panorama.

A very potent instance of Thompson’s strategy is his 1965 portray The Carriage, presently on view in “This Home is Mine,” the primary main exhibition of the artist’s work in twenty years, on the College of Chicago’s Sensible Museum of Artwork. The canvas references Nicolas Poussin’s Autumn: The Spies with the Grapes of the Promised Land (1660–64), an outline of an Outdated Testomony story through which two scouts despatched by Moses return from Canaan carrying a load of oversize grapes, figs, and pomegranates. Since different scouts had returned empty-handed, satisfied that the land would show unattainable to beat, this fruit symbolized for Moses the dependability of God’s phrase; in later interpretations, the grapes, hung from a wood bar, got here to suggest the physique of Christ and coming salvation.

Thompson’s in any other case idyllic panorama twists this Biblical scene by changing the fruit with the legs of a human slung over the pole that the lads assist between their shoulders, maybe hinting on the violence tied to conquering one other land. Whereas the three dwelling figures—the scouts, with their exaggerated stride ahead, and a lady within the background balancing a pot on her head—are all rendered reddish orange, the hanging physique is bluish; whether or not that is to emphasise its standing as a corpse or to designate race appears deliberately ambiguous. The physique hangs like a facet of meat, its bottom uncovered, far much less pure than the plump grapes standing in for the physique of Christ. The loss of life and therapy of this unnamed particular person as bounty introduced again from a hunt makes Poussin’s panorama appear not harmonious, however ominous. Its obvious abundance, Thompson’s iteration suggests, rests on mundane acts of violence.