Robert Davis/Michael Langlois
With a suggestive wink, a naked, pornographically perfect blond becomes the focal point of “House of the Rising Sun,” a carefully curated suite of four recent works by Chicago- and Brooklyn-based collaborators Robert Davis and Michael Langlois. The woman draws the viewer’s gaze to the center of Babylon, a beautiful, sexually charged, oversize blue-tinted painting inspired by ’60s and ’70s rock posters. The view from this modern Tower of Babel transfixes us: Davis and Langlois surround the blond with languid nudes, twining vegetation, frolicking grasshoppers and other animals—including a pig humping a goose.
Look closer, and this place seems more Escheresque than utopian, however. The artists portray a complex balance between power and weakness: Images of women in bondage give Babylon’s flowery psychedelia a sadomasochistic tinge, while two morbidly obese sumo wrestlers who pose on either side of the blond increase the sense of excess. Tapping into the libido’s dark side, Babylon feels like a grown man’s reflection on his greedy, horny teenage mind.
Davis and Langlois’s expertly crafted painting Dads, which they based on photos of their fathers during the Brady Bunch era, also makes nostalgia a critical theme. By expending a vast amount of effort to reproduce their dads’ instant portraits, the artists make us question whether sentimental yearning benefits us or keeps us rooted in the past. Yet Face of God’s bold, abstract, bright-yellow depiction of the sun provides a radiant conclusion to the show, a hopeful end to a fresh take on self-reflection.
