An anonymous 15th-century Belgian miniature depicts a battle from the Books of Maccabees in which the hero Eleazar slays a war elephant whose body is about to crush him to death. The illustration shows a truly whimsical creature, a cross between a donkey and an anteater, with an elongated nose, gray fur and hooves, carrying on its back a stone tower inhabited by three soldiers. The artist, presumably a monk, had obviously never seen an elephant and instead relied on descriptions of the animal. Many similar images exist throughout history and across cultures: manifestations of hearsay, imagination, and interpretation in the absence of visual information. These artists were driven by an insatiable desire to depict places, creatures and people they had never seen. It seems that this desire also animates John Dilg.
Comprised of thirteen small paintings – the largest measuring sixteen inches by twenty – and five drawings, his recent exhibition “Leaving the New World” offered a rare degree of focus and coherence. All the works depict desolate, rough settings with sporadic trees. Despite a few lakes and waterfalls, the geographies seem parched and inhospitable, an effect accentuated by the application of thin, dry paint. The oversized full moon in many images enhances their dreamscape quality. The exhibition text describes Dilg’s works as “painted forms derived from found images and his memory of the American landscape”. Indeed, in the eyes of non-Americans, they are close to our idea from an American view, perhaps from its prairies or its rocky southwest, rather than from a specific location: visions of the nation held by those who have never been there. One might think of Henri Rousseau’s depictions of jungles he never visited. But Dilg’s colors have none of Rousseau’s tropical luxuriance. They are silent, reserved. This place experiences winter.
One wonders why an American painter would want to create images that feel American while looking like it was made by someone who only read about America, depicting fantastic rather than real flora, fauna and geology. The landscape seems inhospitable, but it is not bruised. Perhaps this is what North America might have been had it not been ravaged by colonization and industrialization. Could it be that the desire of the country which has not been realized pushes him to paint these scenes? A drawing with a melancholic title historical fiction (all works 2022), shows a white man in a top hat and a Native American sitting peacefully together in a canoe on calm waters, under a starry sky.
The occasional human figures are tiny and unobtrusive, so fully integrated that they become tree-like features in the landscape – for example, the figure gazing at the whale in Fishing. The only break in this otherworldly serenity is in republic of the jungle, whose title could be a nod to Rousseau. A solitary, proud, defiant leopard fills the width of the canvas and stares directly at the viewer. The animal, illuminated by the full moon, is beautifully rendered, but something is wrong. Maybe his neck is too thick or his head too small? It is reminiscent of the tigers painted by pre-modern Japanese painters, masters who had never seen a tiger.
Dilg is highly skilled and his pictorial erudition is unmistakable. It gives shape to the idea of a place that could have existed but never saw the light of day. This impulse brings him closer to medieval monks imagining the Levant, Japanese painters through the ages aspiring to classical China, or Rousseau dreaming of the jungle. However, unlike these historical predecessors, he works with the full awareness that what he imagines does not exist. As the title of the drawing indicates, it is a fiction. Art allows you to pursue a world that exists only as a concept. It’s a drive that neither melancholy nor loss can temper, because the urge to shape an inaccessible place is one of the reasons we bother to make art.
