Studio Journal With Dean Monogenis

David Gibson for
Gibson Contemporary
2015

The dog days of summer are a great time to interact with art in studios. There is a certain benumbed calm about the interim period between one art season and the next. I was in the studio of Dean Monogenis on Thursday, August 6, and it was refreshing. Dean has a smallish studio in the downstairs of his East Williamsburg apartment. Works in progress and recently finished ones, left hanging just before a recent trip to attend openings in Los Angeles and Madrid, were in evidence. There were five paintings on view, enough to generate a lively discussion lasting nearly two hours. 

Monogenis' primary subject over time has been architecture manifested as metaphysical and phenomenological space. Over the years it has gestated and morphed into an engagement with how to recreate that space in a means that people can understand without relying on painterly abstraction. It has become a sort of standard to replace gestural tropes with  detailed, organizational ones, and then to introduce an element of ambiguous abstract signification back into the naturalistic equation. Monogenis does this by first creating landscapes, then populating them not with people but with their buildings, which for the most part take on the streamlined, obsessively anthropomorphic appearance of futuristic architecture inhabiting desolate areas. His buildings represent the quantitative presence of human agency in any given image. 

Monogenis describes the origin of his current interests as a confrontation, and then an esthetic reevaluation, with the construction boom that took place across New York following the catastrophic event and emotional consequences of September 11, 2001. In the history of New York previous there had never been any structure, especially one of such size and presence, destroyed by an act of foreign aggression. It was a blow to the American psyche. But a certain native perseverance won out. Not only did the powers that be rebuild the World Trade Center, they endeavored to make that one act superfluous by mustering an industry of construction that would change the face of the city forever. This was, in part, what Monogenis witnessed, and what contributed to his burgeoning creative output. By the time that we met he was just rounding the corner into the more developed stage of envisioning how space effects the way we perceive the world. His earliest paintings were images of a deconstructed, floating world in which ultra modern housing divisions, decrepit shacks, and camper vans were all exploding. I had a feeling that the explosions were not really meant as narrative events, but were his way of ether claiming an exception or posing a question. They were a way of breaking down the straightforward aesthetic act of looking at buildings. The explosions lacked conclusiveness despite the violence by which they punctuated their side of the conversation. Monogenis has consistently engaged with the physicality of the urban environment, the metaphysical qualities it imparts, and the mythical space that painting creates. There is nothing extraneous in it, and though he has expanded its purview as well as the visual syntax actively at work within it, it has only become successively accomplished without resorting to fireworks. 

Architectural structures, though prevalent throughout Monogenis' work, are not the primary element. There is also an imposition of narrative events and the layering of expressively abstract elements into the composition to the work as a foil, or palimpsest, to the realistic aspects that, despite their overt functionality or implications of agency, are in themselves abstract or ambiguous in a different way. This is part of the sort of argument that Monogenis wants to present and a manner of addressing the flip side of his identity as a painter.

"Rainbow Gathering" presents three ephemeral structures that begin as multicolored pylons erected upon a moonlike ravaged surface, from which have been erected three separate planet-like metallic spheres, with the pylons extending upwards from their centers and out of the picture. Upon each of these spheres has been generated a cliff side with natural seeming vegetation within which has been constructed a similar building, whether workplace or residence, is unknown. The descriptive word in the work's title refers specifically to the one colorful exception in an otherwise desolate and oblique scene. The implausibility of such a constellation of impossible structures can only be imagined in terms of historically epic narratives taking place over vast intervals of time. They accrue meaning as models for the future possibilities of human habitation in as yet unknown environments. Such idiosyncratic structures describe how the relationship between different aspects of exterior reality create situations with great narrative possibility. Even when the structures seem impossibly fantastical, they motivate the viewer to throw logic to the wind in order to follow such machinations to their inspired ends. 

"Simeon" also presents as a fantasy building with oblique purpose, though after consideration of the painting as a whole, it resolves into a dynamic that makes sense. Yet sensibleness is not the main role of any of Monogenis's paintings. Not trained as an architect, he can actively and progressively depict random structures without having to worry about their usefulness. The forms they take are meant to inspire, entertain, or confound the viewer's native tastes and assumptions of common sense, speaking mainly to ideas reflective of space, scale, and detail. This painting presents what at first seems to be a large square building nested in a crevice atop a mountain, that is flat and very thin. It is essentially two sides  of all windows connected only by a single section of concrete. But look below it in the mountain from either side and also see several smaller structures that resemble homes. The building above them transforms into a large double sided solar panel. Behind it the sun encapsulates it like the frame edges of a tondo, bright and fiery, all in red, the color of dawn. The painting them becomes part fantasy, part function, and part overture to a story not yet told. Its epic aspect is translated as potentiality with wisps of dramaturgy hidden in what is unseen. 

"Palm Canyon Drive" was the largest of Monogenis's new works on view, and it also presented the moodiest perspective. Instead of the sort of epic foregrounding at work in the two previously described works, this one presented the relationship between architecture and dramatic space with a cinematic intimacy. The image on hand presents a view from a neighboring property of some sizable structure next door to where we are, through some trees bearing fruit or flowers, and past a small round swimming pool with a railing leading down into it. This structure next door, the one in view, is either communal or municipal or both, and resembles a parking lot or some other storage facility. There us something uselessly empty about it, passive in a world defined by either industry or habitation. The view we see is through a bright red slightly disordered or merely postmodern design-ed lattice, with irregular lines giving an impression of transparency, but also a palpable sense of emotional distance. The name in the title adds a locale and address to a generally anonymous scene, though we are left to guess whether it describes that, over there, or us in here. 

Another painting which animates a generic setting with both the suggestive personification of architectural form with an imposition of abstract elements to complement or magnify the perspectival intensity, is "Some Keep Geese" which is a head-on view of what appears to be a corporate headquarters located in an industrial park in a nameless suburb. It presents the front does of the building with surrounding wings if the building encompassing every inch of the picture plane on either side, as if it were a live organism, or an endless maze that we have not yet entered. The entrance has an awning that looks like a single plane of stone or metal suspended by ambiguously tensile wire posts, giving the entire structure the feeling that floats in space, and in the very center just beyond recognizable perspective, is a bunch of large and verdant bushes. Beyond the roof of the building is a bright and endless blue sky, and our view of the emptier seven is through a purple tinged lattice that makes us think that we are not approaching this court, but viewing it from just another of the thousand widows ringing it in all sides. This makes us not a viewer with free will, but a slave to the system of corporate power that hums behind every wall. We are the geese in the title, flocking to our busy and nameless purpose like everyone else. 

The fifth and final painting we looked at that day was one that Monogenis dragged out on my request, for he had mentioned during our discussion that he had begun to add elements of texture to his paintings along with the more consistent elements of abstract zips, grids, lattices, and decorative collages that inhabit his landscapes. Named "Archiplex" it depicted two scenes that seemed mutually opposed: an extremely tall corporate tower and a bunch of humble community businesses, like mom and pop stores or gas stations, both inhabiting the same expansive landscape. The disparity between these two parts of the same scene scenes created a gap where flatness and the weight of open space combined with the overbearing presence of the corporate tower, and within this gap Monogenis created what seemed like dimensional filler, a field of flat planes of red, yellow, brown, and other colors, that infers a large organic form such as a tree. Parts of it have an application of silicate to give them the look, or the visual feel, of sandpaper. We can imagine being thrust into the vicinity of this random form and being enfolded by its numerous sections and then encountering its randomly coarse exterior. The complex of organic structures embodied by the Archiplex--which is like an immense equation manifesting in the back of our minds as we struggle to deal with the dimensional challenges of a real emptiness—is not a void but an immense space created by the absence of defining terms. This work addresses and accrues the meaning of what Monogenis’s oeuvre deals with: how space is either filled up or left empty, and it is the space between the two where fear spreads but knowledge creeps in. It's difficult to imagine, that we always have to choose between two few forms or too many ones. The form will always be there but it's the view that counts, and this is what Dean Monigenis allows us to glimpse.