Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too.
His show at Hauser & Wirth is full of psychedelic, violent, eye-searing paintings of scenes from his latest film, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’. The movie (starring Travis Scott and Jordi Molla) takes you on a dizzying, weird, fully infrared trip into the world of a masked assassin, patrolling deep undergrowth and lavish villas on a mission to kill a demonic crime lord. The paintings are full of that same tropical violence, 8-bit menace and throbbing, silent aggression.
Figures brandish machine guns, they slice their way through dense foliage with machetes, stalk around deserted corridors, all rendered in acidly bright yellows, pinks and oranges.
It’s obviously and heavily indebted to modern ultra-violent videogames, which makes it feel teenage and adolescent, immature and stoned, a 2am gaming sesh rendered in paint. But freezing these gaming moments highlights the intensity and weirdness of the activity: gaming allows you to embody a character who’s out to kill, it allows you to take a life in an act of leisure and relaxation. These paintings act as a sort of kink-infused celebration of violence as distraction, as fun, as a break from reality.
A brilliant, atmospheric, intelligently dumb look at violence and leisure
But Korine is an artworld interloper, an outsider, he’s doing it wrong; where’s the fine art degree, where are the art historical references, where are the necessary contemporary themes (identity, memory, etc etc etc)? It’s nothing like most art these days. And what a goddamn relief, because it’s awesome: a break from the homogenous, dominant norm.
There is an issue of context here. Do you, can you, remove the artist from the context of his work as a filmmaker to take him at face value as a painter; do you, can you, remove the paintings themselves from their context as an extension of a film you probably haven’t seen to take them at face value as paintings? I don’t know, I don’t know if you can or should, but I do know that the paintings are good, attractive, weird, unique.
In a world where so much figurative painting looks exactly alike, follows the same market trends, the same hegemony of ideas, Korine’s paintings are their own thing. They’re a brilliant, atmospheric, intelligently dumb look at violence and leisure; psychedelic, intense, uncomfortable beauty, like only Korine can do.
