Arthur Marie’s first solo exhibition in the United States, “Serenity”, presents a selection of paintings representing dark and macabre figures haunted by the undersides of digital culture. The show centers on Marie’s 2021–2021 ongoing “Portrait of a Young Man” series, which features an expressionless teenager locked in his profile. Her pale face and brown hair vary only slightly in the seven pieces here. Occasionally, her side swept bangs extend into face-concealing bangs that sometimes pull back to reveal her blank face. Yet his eyes consistently fail to pop out of his distended head. Still located alone in an arid space, it is doused with a faint silvery luminescence.
The images are reminiscent of the frail, melancholy subjects of Pre-Raphaelite painting, but this teenager is of the digital age, as he appears illuminated by a computer or phone screen (his poor posture protrudes his neck, suggesting overuse of electronic appliances). Even the artist’s canvases recall the dimensions of an iPhone photo, confining his subject to a digitally determined hellish landscape. The mutability of this boy’s features indicates that he is the product of the rigorous self-curation demanded of today’s youth via social media. While his emo haircut and rectangular nerdy glasses in Portrait of a young man #4 (all works 2023) may be self-conscious decisions in constructing identity, he seems to completely lose control of himself in Portrait of a young man #3for his forehead has become severely and monstrously deformed.
In Sexual Convenience (Sexual Convenience), a faceless, neutered cream-colored mannequin is seen, while in Red Road a figure with long hair emerges through a terrible blur. These strange humanoids appear as lofty translations of internet horror folk imagery – virtuoso-designed thin men. Just as the mediating powers of digital technologies can seem supernatural, Marie’s paintings harness the strangeness of online ubiquity in moments of semi-spiritual beauty – an occult aesthetic of digital serenity.
