Eli Langer

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]]]]Eli Langer (born Montreal, Canada 1967) is a Canadian visual artist, In 1993, while 26 years old, Langer rose to prominence in the Toronto art world with a solo exhibition at the Mercer Union Gallery in Toronto.[[1]] The exhibition consisted of 5 paintings and 35 drawings addressing various issues of childhood sexuality,to quote the media release prior to the opening of the exhibition:

"Langer's work focuses on the tender and often abject aspects of sexuality and intimacy. His images are largely informed by intuitive personal and social drives, exploring the phenomenon of intimacy where it exists without the compensation of social or cultural consent.In this series of paintings and drawings, Langer often boldly develops a sexual ambiguity that inadvertently addresses our cultural taboos and the formation of morality."

Langer's exhibition at the Mercer coincided with the addition of s. 163.1 (the "Child Pornography" section) to the Canadian Criminal Code. The new section of the Criminal Code forbids any depiction of a person under the age of 18 engaged in an explicit sexual activity or for a sexual purpose. The law makes no distinction between works of the imagination and works that are based on reality. Langer and the director of the Mercer Union Gallery were arrested by Toronto police, however, ultimately the paintings were the only thing put on trial.

The art community rose to Langer's defence. Well-known figures of the art world such as Michael Snow, Avrom Isaacs and Dennis Reid (a former curator of the National Gallery) testified at the highly theatrical trial, that the works exhibited at the Mercer Union had "artistic merit" (a defence provided by s. 163.1 of the Criminal Code). Ultimately the works were exonerated and returned to Langer. If Langer can be proud of anything about this event it is the democratic rights of Canadians which now have one more protection as a result of his trial and successful defense. The legal victory of Langers defense lies in the 'writing in' of wording which prevents such events from occurring again due to the new interpretation of 'prior restraint' which had allowed in experienced police officers to obtain a tele-warrant, a previously easily obtained search and seizure warrant allowing them to carry out raids. Obtaining the warrant now must face stricter scrutiny of experienced judges.

Langer has not attempted to exploit the media notoriety resulting from this arrest in 1993. His difficult personal experience at the center of the media sensationalism and legal interpretations of his practice at the time did not long interrupt his interests and development as an artist. His claims that event was a culmination of testing the boundaries of conventions and that the event made art and freedom of expression a household topic in Canada, where the consequences and implications of making art have hardly reached beyond the walls and floors of Canadas provincial and insular art world. According to Langer, his art practice developed beyond the morality issue fight-picking he did as a younger painter and with which he exhausted his dealing with legal and moralistic entities. He adds that he moved on, seeking clarity and distance from the event and clearing the way for a 'more substantive articulation of ideas and art making practice'.

He has shown painting and other works in international exhibitions none of which referred to the art or controversy of the Mercer Union show and debacle.

Langer most recently showed painting and sculpture Paul Petro gallery in July 2007. On January 18 2008 he will have his third solo show at Daniel hug Gallery in Los Angeles.

Many people were struck by the confounding elegance of Eli Langer’s latest exhibition in Toronto. Like much contemporary art, you could ‘get it’ in an instant – but what you ‘got’, that was less certain.

A powerful florescent light eliminating all shadow enhanced the dazzling white ground of a painting hanging in the gallery’s window vitrine. Floating against this whiteness were a couple of insouciant washes of oil paint in purple and blue, the lines intersecting in the work’s upper right hand corner to make a 45 degree angle.

That this work has been described as both “Zen-like” and “baroque” gives an indication of the freshness of ground that the artist marks out with this exhibition.

In a media environment that thrives on monotony, shock, and repetition (this is what celebrities are for!) it is exceedingly difficult to create a visual frisson of the new. Much worthy art founders on exactly this rock of seeming overly familiar. Langer’s work in this show has the opposite effect; the artist combines familiar elements to free us from tired habits of looking.

A case in point is a sculpture leaning against the gallery’s back wall in the shape of a large but skinny black ‘x’. Attached to the axis where the two intersecting pieces of wood meet is a small black and white photograph. In it two women stand with their backs to the camera. Doubling the vista they contemplate is the vanishing point conjured by the ‘x’. Like the show as a whole, the work makes for a simple and yet highly sophisticated configuration of the problems of representation.

Across the room a companion piece leans against the wall. Titled, ‘Rum De Dum’ (2007), it features a tightly cropped photo of a woman’s face affixed to the top of a slender black piece of wood. Because the girl in the photo floats above the viewer’s head and touches the floor, the work enacts a literal disembodiment.

Langer speaks about these sculptures as “props,” as a way to position the image. They also serve a related function, as a means to reduce the referential power of the images. This is a canny double maneuver, pushing the show towards abstraction, but keeping it anchored in the real.

The two other paintings in the show echo the window piece’s minimal sensualism. It is the artist’s lightness of touch and assured aesthetic intelligence that allows for his extravagant use of pastels and wash. It is weirdly risky to create works that are this ethereal and pretty.

Although the people in the photos are key figures in Langer’s life, his work here is decidedly non-biographical. Like the disembodied girl’s face, small in scale, dreamy and distant, the artist seems to be pointing his audience in a direction away from humankind’s destructive self-absorption. Of a piece with the whole installation, the girl in ‘Rum De Dum’ is anonymous, just a part of nature. Her subjectivity, like the artist’s is in the work itself.

In this show, Langer uses modest means to deliver euphoric effects. In his return to the fine sensitivity of fine art –a practice long developed by the artist–he presages a massive cultural shift that seems all but imminent. R.H.

In the exhibition at Daniel hug gallery, the figure of the moon, as nocturnal reflective body of light, hovers over this installation of separate works, orbiting around the video projection's fixed shot of white linear forms fleeting drawn on the black surface of water by reflected moonlight. The intense rapidity by which moonlight whips around the water's contours is spellbinding. The shift between nature and artifice is explored as a function of perception changing over time. Cropped like a large canvas, this common natural phenomenon is represented here as a singular experience of an abstract surface, registering a striking visual affinity with Langer's painting practice.

Langer writes: "considering the possibilities of the video and the paintings acting upon each other as balance and counter balance, restlessly the digital pursues the analogue - right hemisphere and left hemisphere brain functions split the mind's load. Pushing on each other and the resulting reciprocal momentum." A painting charts the duration of the artist's process extended over a surface, a temporal experience which Langer understands as a warping of time's normative fabric. Laboring in the studio so that temporal slippage can occur, Langer attempts an act of evacuation in his work - evacuation of figuration, narrative expectation, cliché, and self-consciousness. Erasure and excision are important conceptual concerns, visualized in the pared down expanses of paint barely interrupted by hints of form and line and the smearing of wipe-out brushwork. Painting aspires to becoming a petit mal: the flash of a seizure lasting only a few seconds in which self-conscious activity is suspended (absence seizure) in a state of arrested and elevated time, like tweaked glitches or short circuiting from electrical malfunctions. In the narrow window of the petit mal, painting happens in blind, irrational, and involuntary spasms. Marks are minimal, both sudden and meditative. In the throws of a petit mal, staring spells are characteristic, bringing on an almost child-like condition of fascination and staring into space which the viewer may experience while concentrating in front of Langer's deceptively simple paintings and hypnotic video of moonlight bouncing and reflecting on an open body of water. S.L-G

External links

http://elilanger.com/

http://whitehotmagazine.com/whitehot_articles.cfm?id=851

http://danielhug.com/artists.html

http://www.paulpetro.com/langer/index.shtml

http://whitehotmagazine.com/whitehot_articles.cfm?id=297