Catalogue essay by Leah Ollman

The body needs no glossary to comprehend the impact of Tony Scherman’s paintings, no definition of terms or itemized references. The experience is visceral first, a bit of a shudder beneath the skin, immediate and palpable, as in the witnessing of a cataclysmic force of nature, whose violent beauty at once seduces and dismays. One senses power and a certain defiant grandeur in the work, marks of its resonance with the moral landscape, past and future.

Scherman’s eroded, encrusted, dripped and scorched surfaces feel organic in origin, and the process of their creation strongly evokes the passage and layering of time. The faces that stare incisively out at us do so from generations back, but their physical immediacy in pigmented wax thrusts them into the present to confront us directly.

But why stare into the faces of 1789? Robespierre, Fouchet, Marat–what have they to tell us today? They appear singly, as do the eagle, the cockerel and an arrangement of flowers, isolated against an absolute, theatrical darkness. Scherman floats these fragments, these stills, within a loose, discontinuous narrative that draws from historical accounts, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and the artist’s own private confrontation with the subjects. Without titles applied to the images in the series "About 1789", the narrative empties out, Scherman says, a demotion occurs, and the paintings revert back into their typologies, becoming simply portraits, wildlife paintings, still lifes. With identification of the characters represented, and attention to the clues within the paintings that "point you in a direction if you choose to go, " the series reads as a meditation on mass murder along an historical continuum, an unsettling admission of the humanity of its perpetrators. It builds to a quietly devastating power.

How remote the French Revolution feels from here, from the threshold of the 21st century, yet how urgent and raw remain the moral and political issues raised by the Nazi regime. By inviting Himmler and Goebbels to keep company with Marat and Robespierre, Scherman bridges the two Terrors and forges a visual equation that plays out as forcefully on the wall as it does in history.

"Twas in truth an hour/ of universal ferment," Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution and its crimes against the citizenry it claimed to enfranchise. The Jacobin-led government of 1793-94 has come to be considered a prototype of the modern totalitarian state for its brutal attempts–plotted by Robespierre–at imposing a single, common will upon a diverse and divided populus. Justifying even the most heinous crimes as necessary to uphold the security of the Fatherland, the French revolutionary government, like that of the Third Reich, conducted itself with near-religious fervor and a zero-tolerance policy toward dissent. The Nazi model for the gas chamber dates from this period, Scherman notes, though he spells none of this out in the paintings themselves, for the body needs no glossary. It reads the thickly protected and burned raw skins of the paintings with its own skin. And our eyes search those faces for clues of inner intent, while the subjects’ own cold, sober stares seem to probe us for clues to their legacy.

Scherman depicts Napoleon and Fouchet (who headed the French secret service) as they shave, and "when they look in the mirror they have a moment with themselves that is very intimate, " he says. The self-reflection works both ways, for we occupy the position of the mirror. It is through us that these characters enact their naked reckoning with the self.

"La Vendee" comes the closest to narrative description, with its sinking, upended horse emblematizing the mass drownings carried out by the French revolutionary government in reprisal for a popular revolt. Scherman provides us with loaded, charged and daunting signs, and through the process of questioning, remembering, associating, we supply the connective tissue that binds them–to each other and to ourselves. Typically in Scherman’s paintings, we don’t see events, causes or effects, but only their agents. These sequences of faces testify to the fundamental importance of human agency in the construction of history. They suggest, implicity, that history is but the sum of individual actions carried out by particular men and women, one after the other, after the other–that history, like the surfaces of Scherman’s paintings, is an accretion of gestures over time.

"Before they were monsters," Scherman says of Himmler, Marat, Robespierre, Goebbels, "they were just people." The paintings reveal snippets of the ordinary life, flowers on the table of Himmler’s home, Robespierre as a cherubic infant with a lovely mother. Not just before they were monsters, but as they acted monstrously, these men were also human, partaking of everyday pleasures of the senses. This contradiction, this simultaneity of impulses, is what disturbs Scherman and what activates the moral plane of the paintings. For if these images assert the presence of the human within the monstrous, do they not also, by extension, suggest that facets of the monstrous might lie within the range of the human?

These faces that stare out at us, so tightly cropped that they seem to press into our space, belong to believers in the ideological power of imagery. Both the Jacobins and the Nazis saturated their subjects with propaganda– verbal, visual, and even musical. Mass indoctrination began at early childhood in both cultures. In France, children were taught the proper use of the exclamation point through the example: "How sweet it is to die for the Fatherland!" During both the French Revolution and the Nazi era, books, newspapers, plays, musical compositions and festivals all fell under the censorious control of the state, which condemned any work that didn’t overtly endorse the regime as corrupt, or degenerate.

Two of Scherman’s subjects, Marat and Goebbels, were primary engineers of propaganda in their day. Marat, a journalist martyred in the revolution (and famously immortalized in a painting by David), begged for the blood of the people in his speeches, Scherman notes. "When Marat was alive, doing his oratory, he was referred to as a bird of prey, swooping down on his enemies and attacking them through rhetoric." Scherman paints him as a eagle, beak open in mid-cry, fierce and imposing. The eagle, Scherman adds, was also a prominent symbol of power in Nazi Germany, where Reich propaganda minister Goebbels–his face veiled in a rich peacock blue in "Waiting for Marat"–declared that the political movement should be total and comprehensive, influencing the individual’s leisure time and holidays as much as his political attitude.

"Images preach, preach without ceasing," wrote Diderot in the 18th century. "Let us exhibit pictures of virtues and they will find imitators." Scherman, as fluent in art’s capacity as an ideological weapon as he is intrigued by the way things double back on themselves and become their opposite, has painted images redolent of vice that yet may inspire virtue. Centuries ago, those who painted defamatory images of transgressors were unwillingly burdened with an aura of shame themselves. Scherman may actually be inviting this transference in his paintings of tyrants. Convinced that genocide will occur again, he forces an identification with the perpetrators that obligates him–and us–to assume a share of responsibility. The paintings serve, in a canny, oblique way, as warnings.

Scherman’s characters are not one-dimensional monsters any more than history is a fixed tale of the battle between forces of good and evil. History exists only in rough drafts and identities too, remain fluid, ever in the making even after death, through the selective memory of others. Scherman’s surfaces, like the subjects they contain, are sites of contention and change, embodiments of viscous, ensnaring time. Sculptures in low relief as much as they are paintings, they evoke a changing topography, an evoking landscape that knows no closure. Scherman, like the historian Simon Schama, privileges "chaotic authenticity over the commanding neatness of historical convention." Though he puts names to these faces, he doesn’t label them as heroes or villains. In the paintings, they are simply daunting presences, mirrors to our own capacities, our own moral range, the multiple possibilities of the self. Looking back through time compels us to look within. By infiltrating our consciousness, these paintings of historical figures ascend into the role of historical agents themselves.

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