Yuki Higashino on John Dilg
An nameless fifteenth-century Belgian miniature depicts a battle from the Books of the Maccabees through which the hero Eleazar slays a struggle elephant whose physique is about to crush him to dying. The illustration reveals a really fanciful creature, a cross between a donkey and an anteater, with an elongated nostril, grey fur, and hooves, bearing on its again a stone tower inhabited by three troopers. The artist, presumably a monk, had evidently by no means seen an elephant and relied as an alternative on descriptions of the animal. Many related photos exist all through historical past and throughout cultures: manifestations of rumour, creativeness, and interpretation within the absence of visible data. These artists have been pushed by the insatiable craving to depict locations, creatures, and other people they’d by no means seen. It seems this need additionally drives John Dilg.
Consisting of 13 small work—the most important measuring sixteen by twenty inches—and 5 drawings, his current exhibition “Leaving the New World” supplied a uncommon diploma of focus and consistency. All of the works depict forlorn and tough settings with sporadic timber. Regardless of some lakes and waterfalls, the geographies look parched and inhospitable—an impact heightened by the skinny and dry paint utility. The oversize full moon in most of the footage enhances their dreamscape high quality. The exhibition textual content described Dilg’s works as “painted kinds derived from discovered photos and his reminiscence of the American panorama.” Certainly, to non-American eyes, they’re near our thought of an American vista, maybe of its grasslands or its rocky Southwest, reasonably than any particular locale: visions of the nation held by those that have by no means been there. One would possibly consider Henri Rousseau’s depictions of jungles he by no means visited. However Dilg’s colours don’t have anything of Rousseau’s tropical lushness. They’re muted, reserved. This place is aware of winter.
One wonders why an American painter would wish to create footage that really feel American whereas trying as if they have been made by somebody who has solely examine America, depicting fantastical reasonably than actual flora, fauna, and geology. The panorama seems inhospitable, however it’s not scarred. Maybe it’s what North America may need been, had it not been ravaged by colonization and industrialization. Might or not it’s {that a} eager for the nation that didn’t come to go drives him to color these scenes? One drawing, melancholically titled Historic Fiction (all works 2022), reveals a top-hatted white man and a Native American man sitting collectively peacefully in a canoe on calm waters, below a starry sky.
Occasional human figures are tiny and unobtrusive, so totally built-in that they grow to be components, like timber, within the panorama—for example, the determine watching the whale in Fishing. The one rupture of this otherworldly serenity is in Jungle Republic, whose title is likely to be a nod to Rousseau. A lone leopard, proud, difficult, fills the width of the canvas and appears immediately on the viewer. The animal, illuminated by the total moon, is fantastically rendered, however one thing about it’s off. Maybe its neck is just too thick or its head too small? It remembers tigers painted by premodern Japanese painters, masters who had by no means seen a tiger.
Dilg is very expert, and his painterly erudition is unmistakable. He provides form to an thought of a spot which may have however didn’t come into being. This drive unites him with medieval monks imagining the Levant, Japanese painters all through the ages pining for classical China, or Rousseau dreaming of the jungle. Nevertheless, in contrast to these historic predecessors, he works with the total consciousness that what he imagines doesn’t exist. Because the drawing’s title suggests, it’s a fiction. Artwork permits one to pursue a world that exists solely as an idea. It’s a drive that neither melancholy nor loss can mood, as a result of the impulse to provide a form to a spot one can not attain is likely one of the causes we trouble making artwork in any respect.
