Dean Monogenis:
The Precision of Nowhere

Ara H. Merjian

Prominent among the brushes, tools, and tubes scattered around Dean Monogenis’s studio are set squares and T-squares: implements associated less with the practice of painting than with architectural drafting.  Bearing prominent geometries and consistently architectural dimensions, the artist’s images reveal an unswerving affinity between their painted spaces and the built environment at large.  That he paints chiefly upon wooden panel – itself a building material – only underscores the fundamentally tectonic preoccupation of his imagery.  

Wrought from unmistakably modern materials, the rationalist and post-modern structures in Monogenis’ images occupy non-descript spaces – an ambiguity evoked, in a duly ironic key, in the titles of paintings like Not Here, Not There, but Somewhere (2006) and Nearest Far Away Place (2011).  These unplaceable places are routinely distinguished by natural phenomena, whether cliffs, mountain ranges, bodies of water, outcroppings, forests, waterfalls, copses, or promontories.  In various instances, the architecture appears wholly integrated into these landscapes; in others, the natural environment serves as a backdrop or repoussoir to more arresting architectural configurations.  If many of the paintings’ edifices appear completed and functional (At the Onset, 2011; Cuenca, 2013; Simeon, 2015; Archiplex, 2015), numerous others remain unfinished, subject to construction of one sort or another (Cathedral, 2010; A Wish for Good Measure, 2014; In the Eyes of an Ordinary Object, 2014).  We find lattices of scaffolding, unfinished façades, unpainted billboards, panes of glass detached and awaiting integration.  The human hands responsible for assembling such components are nowhere to be seen, whether as agents or inhabitants, at labor or leisure.  The utter newness of these buildings renders all the more unsettling their bizarrely arrested development, or apparent abandonment.  A figurative world bereft of figures. 

The structures in Monogenis’s images evince far less rationalism than their international-style functionalism would seem to suggest.  That is, for all the precision of their geometries, the scenes just as often reveal a degree of whimsy, fantasy, and nonsensicality.  Some of the paintings – consider The Third, 2012, for example – disclose their implausibility outright; here, upon two improbably hovering outcroppings, sit two multi-level structures alongside other unfathomable elements: long cantilevered panels, a thin, meandering orange pipe, and – at the top of the composition – two swatches of striped and checkered abstraction, pressed flat against the picture plane.  Parkland (2012) reveals a painting elevated in the sky and seen from below, with colored panes and lathes trailing in its wake, while Drone in the Sky Silly Disciples (2008) renders the respective scales and orientation of its tree branch and floating, transparent geodesic enclosure wholly indecipherable.  Yet if these images leave little doubt as to their spatial and practical unlikelihood, Monogenis’s works generally disclose their strangeness only gradually, incrementally, through details of scale, placement, and – eventually – sheer spatial aporia.  It is only upon sustained looking, for example, that the large, pitched shed of Signs (2017) reveals itself to be wholly incongruous in scale to its surrounding space and structures, throwing into question the dimensions of the entire landscape.  Only a careful study of Intercontinental (2013), to take another example, reveals the central building’s reflection in a body of water to be an extension of the building itself, surrounded by a set of stools anchored, in fact, upon solid ground.  In short, the scenes’ eccentricities rub up against a general premise of believability, contradicting feasibility without flouting it entirely.  

Experimenting with sculptural installations, Monogenis has brought his painted imagery into real space on various occasions.  Mounted in Sharon, Connecticut, the 2007 piece Waiting on the Age of Aquarius comprised a geodesic dome capped by a soaring column – a pairing that seemed to bring the artist’s imagery into three dimensions.  In a similar vein, the seven, striped rectangular blocks comprising Monogenis’s City Pillars – erected on New York’s Randall’s Island in 2014 – likewise concretized the abstractions incorporated into many of the artist’s paintings.  The public sculptures at once echoed the Manhattan and Brooklyn cityscapes flanking the East River, and invited use by passersby as benches.  City Pillars spurs us to look again at a painting like Intercontinental, in which a striped horizontal motif tops a latticed vertical tower, rising up from a rationalist structure itself formed of colored cubes.  Monogenis’s images deploy architectonic and flattened, abstract elements almost interchangeably. 

The coexistence of the rational and the whimsical in Monogenis’s work may be traced, in part, to the “historical” avant-gardes, between the Word Wars in Europe, which plainly nourish the basic dimensions of his imagery.  In the more patently “utopic” projects of De Stijl in Holland, or El Lissitzky’s Proun works, geometry formed the vehicle of forward-thinking revisions to aesthetics and – it was assumed – to design and the built environment, steeped as much is a sense of fantasy as of practicality.  A good deal of early twentieth-century Mitteleuropean modernism, particularly the internationally disseminated versions of Russian  Constructivism, lingers on in Monogenis’ imagery.  To that end we might identify a vague genealogy – however oblique or unintentional – from Malevich’s Suprematism, to Lissitzky’s UNOVIS projects, through to the application of these tendencies in intermedia experiments from Hungary to the Bauhaus.  To wit, Monogenis’ recent, large-scale series of drawings of acrylic on paper, which reveal large blocks of unspecified material erected into makeshift machines, mounted on logs and fastened together with ropes.  The contraptions raise various unanswered questions as to their purpose or practicality.  More certain, though, is their resonance with aspects of Constructivism in its international guises, for example the quirky apparatuses designed by Ivo Pannaggi in the 1920s, evidence of the Italian artist’s formation as a Futurist painter, as well as his studies at the Bauhaus from 1927 to 1933.  That one of the works is titled Rodchenko (2018) only underscores the series’ patent affinities with the legacies of Constructivism, including its original Russian avant-garde context. 

Consider, in a related vein, The New Adam (1924) by the Hungarian painter and graphic designer, Sándor Bortnyik.  The painting depicts a dapper bourgeois gentleman seemingly made to order – ready to be wound up as an automaton of some sort.  With a motor diagrammed on the painting’s central panel, the scene’s looming and floating geometric solids plainly evoke Suprematist and Constructivist elements, wrought now into a brave new landscape, redolent of some social utopia.  As much as Bortnyik ironizes modernism’s quixotic (and increasingly international) idiom, he also avails himself of its formal and architectural vocabulary.  In Monogenis’ work we find not only resonances of these structural and compositional elements, but a similar – and poignant – ambivalence with regard to architectural novelty, and the notion of idealized, futuristic spaces.  For, Monogenis’ imagery speaks not simply to a bygone strain of European modernism, but simultaneously to contemporary fantasies, pleasures, and anxieties, and more specifically, to their projections in, or even as, landscape.  

The fresh construction sites, occasional cranes, and buildings-in-progress which populate the artist’s paintings inevitably evoke the phenomenon of rampant real estate development, as well as the trends of globalization to which it is related.  Monogenis has spoken about his personal experience of such development close to his home in Brooklyn, New York, in ways which shed some light upon the peculiar affect of his imagery, frequently in abeyance between marvel and menace:

Buildings grew nearly over night like mushrooms or mold before my very eyes.  I found it simultaneously engaging and frightening.  The instinct to develop every last inch of real estate was palpable. Buildings that sprouted up would often supplant or sit next to an older building with little regard for continuity or urban planning.  There was a strong sense that all decisions were made out of expedience and practical necessity with little oversight. After overcoming my initial shock, I began to distance myself and consider the situation aesthetically.

That “distance” informs the affective detachment of these environments as painted by Monogenis.  Though his imagery is by no means documentary or topographical, he does register various dimensions of actual, extant structures.  These he photographs in his various travels, or else gleans from the internet as source material for details, often merged with other, disparate source buildings.  The Night Garden (2011) depicts a bulbous, reticulated structure reminiscent of some visionary building designed by the Archigram collective, or even by some Futurist architect like Antonio Sant’Elia or Mario Chiattone, though its original inspiration was the Biosphere 2 building in Arizona.  The geodesic domes of Consensus of the Forgotten (2007) and Commune Edition (2009), meanwhile, conjure up the utopian renderings of Buckminster Fuller, and many of Monogenis’ paintings share a great deal with some of the experiments of the “Radical Architecture” pioneered in Italy in the 1960s, most notably the group Superstudio.   The group’s quixotic, utopian designs proposed not actual, realizable construction, so much as a playful destabilization of expectation, and a challenge to architectural and social propriety.  The appearance of monumental, rationalist structures in natural settings, as in the Superstudio’s The Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model For Total Urbanisation (1969) – which avails itself of avant-garde collage and montage strategies – anticipates some of the basic features of Monogenis’ imagery. 

The majority of the artist’s represented buildings allude, however, to more plainly contemporary structures – by turns modernist and post-modernist – and with them, contemporary affects (and disaffections).  A painting like China Construction (2017) incorporates aspects of Hong Kong’s recent building boom, though its title tellingly alludes to the economic impetus of the country’s larger neighbor.  Already the site of the largest number of skyscrapers in the world, the area remains a nexus of both contemporary architectural design and tentacular development (Hong Kong’s contactless transit card is fittingly called “The Octopus”).  Zaha Hadid’s series of canvases from the 1980s and early 1990s on this urban zone offer some poignant comparisons with Monogenis’ work, particularly given their shared influence by Suprematist painting.  The latter’s painting evinces an engagement with Asian culture not merely in terms of actual cityscapes or buildings, but also in terms of art historical influence.  The atmospheric perspective deployed in hanging scrolls from the Ming Dynasty – particularly Dai Jin’s Travelers Through Mountain Passes (1388-1462) – plainly contribute to Monogenis’ frequent depictions of soaring cliffs, alongside Byzantine renderings of monastic sites such as Meteora in Greece.  Many of his works reveal further attention to the Japanese screen and scroll paintings of the Ukiyo-e period (That Ukiyo-e means “pictures of the floating world” resonates with the aerial bouyancy of so many of Monogenis’ floating structures).  Just as European painters were drawn to Japanese prints – and their bounded areas of flattened color – in the late nineteenth century, several Ukiyo-e artists, such as Utogawa Toyoharu, notably assimilated Western perspective in their depictions of landscape.  This kind of pictorial and cultural exchange lends context to our current epoch of globalization – an increasingly corporatized uniformity rehearsed in Monogenis’ paintings, with their relentlessly generic sites and structures, combined from a range of pictorial, architectural, and cultural sources. 

To be sure, the juxtaposition of disparate objects and topographies is not always entirely harmonious.  Monogenis has referred to his own imagery as producing “situational relationships of otherwise incongruous elements.”  Once again, the historical avant-gardes rear their head.  The Metaphysical cityscapes (1910-1919) of Giorgio de Chirico, which significantly altered the course of Surrealist painting in the early 1920s, bear significantly upon Monogenis’ landscapes in terms of their practiced incongruities.  For, no other twentieth-century artist so distinctly transformed the modernist representation of painted space – a transformation which hinged upon the commingling of seemingly unrelated objects in evacuated spaces.  Monogenis’ work also shares a good deal with the work of René Magritte, whose encounter with de Chirico’s paintings in the late 1920s hastened the Belgian painter’s conversion to Surrealism (Magritte would later remark that de Chirico had managed to “paint thought”).  

While de Chirico’s strategies of displacement and dépaysement certainly inform Monogenesis’ mode of painting, the decidedly modern air and meticulous, licked surfaces of Magritte’s paintings form even more salient touchstones.  If de Chirico homed in on city squares suspended between antiquity and modernity, Magritte instead trained his brush upon the banal spaces of suburban contemporaneity.  The art historian and curator William Rubin once noted that Magritte “sought an almost total prosaism in the things he represented.”  By this Rubin means not that the painter homes in solely upon the plain or straightforward, but rather that his visual lyricism – like Metaphysical painting before it – hinges upon the ordinary made strange.  “As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.”  This line from the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869) became a kind of unofficial anthem for Surrealist painting during the 1920s, and Magritte’s contributions – immaculate juxtapositions suggesting a kind of “painted collage” – exemplified with particular precision the verse’s seamless conjunction of disparate elements.

Featuring large inflatables looming above their landscapes, paintings by Monogenis like Arctic Covenant (2011) and A Friend in Flight (2013) recall Magritte’s Les Belles relations (1967), for example – not merely in terms of iconography or setting, but in the general air of whimsy mixed with a degree of unease.  So, too, does Magritte’s Castle in the Pyrenees (1959) find an echo in the magically floating outcroppings of The Third (2012) and The Other Way (2013), topped with structures just like the Belgian painter’s improbably hovering mass of rock.  The paintings of Alberto Savinio – younger brother of Giorgio de Chirico and distinguished artist in his own right – suggest further points of comparison with Monogenis’ imagery, particularly in their shared evocation of often airborne, colored architectural elements.  Floating above or soaring through otherwise unremarkable landscapes, Savinio’s mounds of toys and colored wooden objects – themselves influenced by Surrealist imagery – reveal a fundamentally architectural preoccupation, even as they frequently deploy literary allusions (whether biblical or mythical).  It is precisely this literary strain which further links Monogenis’s work to Surrealist precedent.  To wit, the mysterious, allusive ring of some of his titles – Some Keep Geese, When Silence Can Seem Like Consent, The Stranger We Find, I Was a Landscape in Your Dream, Pythia – the meaning of which notably departs from their attendant, respective imagery (Indeed, the artist has described how his selection of titles – often randomly gathered from newspaper headlines – derives from the precedent of Surrealist games).  To be sure, the artist also makes use of straightforwardly topical titles (Cuenca, Parkland, California, etc.)  Yet he seems most at ease in creating a disjunction between an image’s title and its contents, opening up a kind of hermeneutic fissure between designation and expectation.  

Monogenis’ imagery often recalls the Surrealist obsession with the fantastic and the marvelous – the eruption of the strange in and among the everyday.  Yet even more apposite to his painting is the related, but slightly different, phenomenon of magical realism.  First popularized by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925, the term came to designate a wide range of paintings – both in Germany and elsewhere – anchored in realist figuration but shot through with peculiarly unsettling elements.  In Roh’s words:

We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world that celebrates the mundane. This new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism. It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things.... it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world.

In resisting exaggerated, demonstrable distortions, while evincing an uncanny sense of disquiet, Monogenis’s painting often approximates the strategies of various magical realist artists.  Perhaps most strikingly, the paintings of Franz Radziwill come to mind.  Though known chiefly for his neue sachlichkeit landscapes of the 1920s and 30s (as well as a controversial adherence to the National Socialist party), Radziwill notably sustained his style well into Germany’s post-war reconstruction.  Paintings such as The Colorful Gasometer and Loneliness reveal older urban neighborhoods which now host the looming signs of a building (and economic) boom, from cranes and gasometers to gossamer skyscrapers.  In addition to its fundamentally (sub)urban and architectural fixations, as well as its formal and chromatic strategies, it is the fundamental ambivalence of Radziwill’s imagery with regard to these transformed spaces which resonates with Dean Monogenis’s work. The latter must certainly also be considered alongside other contemporary painters of contemporary architectural spaces, perhaps most notably Daniel Rich (U.S.), Marco Petrus (Italy), and Petra Trenkel (Germany).  Far more than these artists, however, Monogenis creates atmospheres at once propitious to narrative, and simultaneously devoid of anecdotal activity or events.  The tension between an inhabitable built environment and a sense of mystery – even unease – renews itself with each scene.  Even in its stillness, architecture here is no inert phenomenon, but often seems to bear an uncanny life of its own. 

Part of that uncanniness derives not merely from spatial displacements or phenomenal oddities, but rather from evocations of time.  As its title would suggest, After the Storm (2012) depicts a landscape seemingly ravaged by wind and rain – fences torn, leaves aflutter, sky dripping as if with the residue of the eponymous squall.  Rather than a scene pregnant with anticipation, in which time appears on the verge of some arrival or event, we find instead a rather anti-climactic aftermath.  A Place to Start (2008) depicts what looks like a radio tower, silhouetted in deep maroon against a hazy, yellow-brown sky, flanked at left by a vertical zip of stripes found often in the artist’s imagery (That he worked for years as a studio assistant to the American-based Irish abstractionist, Sean Scully, sheds some light on this motif, though Monogenis eschews Scully’s more painterly tendencies for crisp, razor-sharp lines).  Placed at the same level as this soaring tower, our vantage point is necessarily a vertiginous one, suspended in mid-air.  But more striking than the image’s spare ethereality, or its radically cropped tower, is the economy with which the image evokes a time of day.  For, the tower appears by virtue not of its material, metallic presence, but rather an outline of its shadowed steel lattice.  Monogenis thus reveals himself attuned not only to the strangeness of space and the built environment, but to the nuances of temporality.  

Even still, landscape, space, and architecture remain the primary coordinates of the artist’s aesthetics.  Over the past year or so, Monogenis has turned his hand to painting interior spaces, most notably swimming pools.  Two Types of Peace (2016) already announced this new penchant, since explored in a number of recent works from 2018, including Swimming Hall and Summer Olympics, which is based upon the pool at the London Aquatics Center built by Zaha Hadid Architects.

While Swimming Hall depicts a staid, straightforward pool interior, the latter reveals an intricate, grill-like overlay painted in a black and white symmetrical pattern.  The pattern short-circuits the view of the pool’s expanse, erecting a certain tension between the scene’s perspectival recession and its almost decorative surface.  In other recent examples, particularly beginning with a series of paintings from 2016, the artist has courted these superimposed elements as a kind of competing element with the scene behind it.  In paintings like Collide, Honk Kong Holiday, Interloper, and Age of Sail, fragmented geometric patterns are overlaid atop otherwise coherent architectural settings.  While Collide reveals angular, white and green striped shards dancing across a seascape framed by a building with an open portico, the torn, striped patterns of Interloper prove difficult to distinguish from the scene’s architectural elements.  The painting thus engenders visual confusion as to where space ends and pictorial surface – for surface’s sake – begins.  

We may trace some of these tendencies to Monogenis’s earliest series of paintings.  Already in 2004, a painting like Love of Labor juxtaposes a construction site in perspective with a wholly flat, decorative pattern, seemingly extraneous to the scene’s topography.  Retreat or Retrench (2008) takes this to the extreme.  Behind a verdant bluff capped by a house on stilts, rises a checkered, multi-colored grid – a kind of enlargement of the tessellation incorporated into Plebian Dream (2005) and Consensus of the Forgotten, swollen now to comprise the painting’s entire surface.  Monogenis has since explored this motif in several, more recent works.  Across the entire field of Myrtle Beach (2015) extends – in place of sky – a patchwork of striped and gridded color swatches, short-circuiting the rendering of landscape with a wholly decorative motif.  Background becomes, instead, a relentless, importunate frontality.  Depth finds itself abruptly interrupted by geometric particularities, plumb with the picture plane.  Already in Consensus of the Forgotten, Monogenis undermined the perceptual difference between picture plane and depicted space.  The white background against which the painting’s architectural elements are placed peels away in the upper left and right corners to reveal areas of blue lightly flecked with white.  Are we looking at the night sky behind the pale silhouette of a craggy mountain (as the waterfall would seem to suggest)?  Or does the blue paint instead pour down an otherwise plain, white background, asserting itself as an opaque, formal interruption into the white area’s spatial depth?  

More recently paintings like Age of Sail (2016) further complicate this play of depth and surface by incorporating what seem like reflections in glass, dispersed across the field of vision in various areas of the painting.  Such reflections seem to signal objects or structures behind the viewer, which nevertheless appear reproduced before him, exacerbating the sense of spatial disorientation.  Interestingly, even when he seemingly assails the spatial integrity of certain scenes with wayward decorative motifs, the latter end up serving some sort of structural or engineering purpose.  Such is the case in Pythia (2015), in which two yellow bands turn from vertical into horizontal and come to host some sort of (wordless) traffic sign.  Such elements conjure up what Monogenis has referred to as “hard-edged figuration” – an ironic play upon the post-painterly, “hard-edged abstraction” which seized the New York School in the late 1950s and 1960s, and an apt allusion to his scenes’ consistent accommodation of abstract elements to a figurative domain.  

Light itself appears in several of Monogenis’ paintings as a delineated, geometric entity in its own right, whether in layered, concentric spheres or diagonal rays.  The strobing and flashing lights which radiate outward in various paintings – Longevity Rises (2010), More Luxury Standard (2010), P.OV. (2013) –  lead the viewer’s eye to different areas of the painting.  So do the ropes and wires which appear in a wide swathe of Monogenis’ paintings, though more subtly.  These appear embedded in scenes as seemingly functional objects, strung between buildings and towers like electrical or high-tension cables.  In various other instances, they anchor the canopies and awnings hovering in numerous images.  Yet in several instances, these lines divagate from any practical purpose, either breaking into pieces (In the Eyes of an Ordinary Object, 2014), ascending outside the frame (After the Storm; The Nearest Faraway Place; Arctic Covenant, 2011), or else looping across the visual field as a wholly autonomous phenomenon (Drone in the Sky Silly Disciples, 2008).  Here, once again, form supersedes any apparent functionalism, marking with meticulous precision a trajectory leading nowhere

1. Dean Monogenis, Artist’s statement for The Drawing Center, New York, July 30, 2015; http://www.drawingcenter.org/viewingprogram/portfolio3c24.html?pf=10430

2. William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968) 91.  See also Gaëton Picon, Surrealists and Surrealism, 1919-1939 (New York: Rizzoli, 1983) p. 144.

3. On the trope of “painted collage” in de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings, see Ara H. Merjian, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

4. Dean Monogenis, “Titled,” Dec. 2, 2013, Dirty Laundry, http://dirtylaundrymag.com/articles/dean-monogenis/.  [“I loosely got the idea from hearing Robert Motherwell in Painters Painting describe how the surrealists would randomly open a favorite book and then put their finger on the page. Whatever words they touched would be the title they were looking for.]

5. Franz Roh, “Magical Realism – Post-Expressionism,” translated and reprinted in Lois Parkinson Zamora, Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995) p. 17.