The world is getting bleaker and more brutal, if we are to gauge the zeitgeist in how Robert Langenegger has jumped from bucolic baroque greenery to rigid, jagged greys of the built environment.  His recent series of paintings for his upcoming exhibit POPULIST PERVERSION are seeming behind-the-scene tableaus of construction workers in tasks enacted beyond their designation. A stark contrast to Cesar Legaspi’s The Workers where the modern master’s depiction of such are rendered in rhythmic sinewy lines, their faceless muscled limbs receding into the blocky cityscape choreographed into a harmonious staccato ballet.  Meanwhile, in Edades’ The Builders, these figures are sunburnt, naked, wrestling with dark granite blocks indistinguishable from their straining Sisyphean bodies in a vague mossy terrain of boulders and low hills.   They fit a type most certainly – muscled, an Olympian almost, yet they are but figures in a landscape, romanticized but anonymous nonetheless.  In Langenegger’s, they are already specified as ‘construction workers’, not just workers or builders. Moreover, their less muscular physique are clothed in the uniform of such – safety helmets and vests and long sleeve shirts, their facial features exaggerated to the point of caricature looking pitiful and cruel at the same time. They perform less Herculean tasks, but are instead engaged in macabre grotesqueries and dumb idling. A far cry indeed from their art historical predecessor. But why? Why indeed.  Is it contempt that lie at the subconscious of it?  Or rather the matter-of-factness of the creeping perversion of monumental ideals, building a city from tower to rubble? Or are we mistaken to see Langenegger’s figures as “humans” consciously laboring for compensated work?  For Marx, the distinction between man and animals is that human beings work, animals just behave.  For work or rather labor, is work that has already existed ideally and a result that has been conceived from such where man has not only effected a change in the nature of materials, but has also realized his own purpose in those materials.  Animals exert effort or conduct operations in the mimesis of such labor without a design in mind, it operates by instinct of mere survival.  An existence of basic survival is perverting humanity to its basest.  To exist as mere bodies, as part of the props of a theatre of development, freely tossed around with the GI sheets, concrete blocks, and rusting iron tools, fleshy automatons in a neo-lib Cryptozoa. 

Now here framed, the limits of the canvas are the iron bars of a cage in a zoo. We are directed to watch this menagerie of nasty pictures, paintings as shitposts, and the visual vernacular is internet-speak. The value of a message must attain memeability, not any more mimesis, per se.

The piece Q: How many construction workers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Only one but half a dozen others will have to watch and supervise is very much self-explanatory, and yet encapsulates the very world of the internet zoo.

We are always wont to see such profane depictions in Langenegger’s paintings, the lurid, the excess depravity, turning that depiction into its head and goading as much within the viewer the illicit rubber necking for gore and debasement. It was set in his mind, planned as an architect, built up our anticipation of it, setting us up in the programmed spectating of such.  We are worked up as viewers, as another set of cryptozoa, viewing as a form of work itself, in the transactional tableau of culture and labor. We behave as expected of us.