Fendry Ekel Entries

Fendry Ek el

Fendry Ekel

F R O NT C O V ER

Investigation #2 2012 oil and acrylic on canvas 225 × 160 cm

e k e l

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ESSAY BY

( 1971, Jakarta, Indonesia) studied fine art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the esteemed Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. As an outcome of his solo exhibition at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (HVCCA) in New York in 2010, he was invited to participate in the International Studio and Curatorial Pro­ gram (ISCP), New York in 2011. Ekel has been dubbed a pictor doctus, who critically investigates the power of art, figuration and represen­ tation by appropriating iconic images from our collective memory.

His multilayered monumental paintings after existing photographs explore the relations between man and memory. Fendry Ekel has exhibited his work internationally and had recurring solo shows in Amsterdam, Jakarta, Milan, Valencia, Mexico City and New York. Ekel lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Berlin, Germany.

Christophe Van Gerrewey

Edited

e n t r i e s

(5) To Sweet Delight, (7) Charlie Chaplin, (9) Greta Garbo as Mata Hari, (10) Jealousy, (11) Leon Trotsky, (12) Melancholia, (15) Tropical Anthem #1, (16) Tropical Anthem #2, (17) Tropical Anthem #3, (18) Witness #6, (20) Bohemian Twins #1, (21) Bohemian Twins #2, (22) Greta Garbo as Mata Hari, (23) Investigation #1, (26) Investigation #5, (28) Investigation #7, (29) Investigation #8, (30) Investigation #9, (35) Thinker, (36) 1987, (37) Untitled (1987), (39) Investigation #10

F e n d r y

Entries

Fendry Ekel

BY

Astrid Honold

Fendry Ekel

Entries is a comprehensive monograph with contributions by several international art historians, looking into the painter’s recent work on canvas from 2011 to 2015. The first chapter, ‘Chess Problems: On the Paintings of Fendry Ekel’, is an introduction by the prize-winning Belgian author Christophe Van Gerrewey. It addresses Ekel’s aesthetic thinking as well as the artistic strategies he applies when dealing with images. For the second chapter, ten art historians – one curator and one artist, all colleagues of the book’s editor Astrid Honold – have been matched with a particular painting from Ekel’s oeuvre and invited to write about it, departing from Van Gerrewey’s observations. This ad­ aptation of the ‘catalogue entry’, a concise commissioned text on one specific artwork, allows for an in-depth study of Ekel’s practice, based on phenomenological facts and bringing together multiple individual perspectives as well as theoretical approaches.

The concept of this book, which departs from artistic practice in establishing a close relationship between  image and text, is re­ flected in its intelligent and refined layout by Studio Laucke Siebein, Amsterdam /Berlin – Black Cat Publishing’s sole partner for graphic design matters since the publisher was founded in 2005.

Fendry Ek el

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Contents

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C ONTENTS

CHRISTOPHE VAN GERREWEY Chess Problems: On the Paintings of Fendry Ekel

p. 10

(A) MICHAL B. RON To Sweet Delight

p. 30 Common Ground p. 40

(B) CONSTANZE VOGT Jealousy

p. 42 (C) Dávid Fehér Precarious Identities of the Sur/face: On Two Portraits by Fendry Ekel

p. 48

7 C ONTENTS

(D) ANJA VERCH Melancholia

p. 58 (E) JASMIN-BIANCA HARTMANN Witness

p. 64 Investigation #2 p. 70

Investigation #3 p. 72

(F) CHRISTINE COCCA Investigation #5: Those Two Hands: Fragments of History in Fendry Ekel’s Work

p. 74 Investigation #6 p. 85

C ONTENTS

(G) FRANZ ENGEL Investigation #7: Humboldt as Columbo Fendry Ekel’s Art of Blending

p. 88 (H) BRUNA HAUTMAN Investigation #10: Letter to Fendry

p. 96 (I) NICOLA TREZZI Greta Garbo as Mata Hari

p. 104 (J) PAUL MELLENTHIN Thinker

p. 110

9 C ONTENTS

(K) JAN-FREDERIK RUST Bohemian Twins

p. 120 Republic p. 126

Quo Vadis p. 128

Carpe Diem p. 130

(L) ASTRID HONOLD 1987: Man and Memory

p. 132

IMAGE INDEX

FENDRY EKEL

AUTHORS

alphabetical

Biography

Biographies

p. 145

p. 169

p. 183

chronological

Bibliography

p. 151

p. 177

COLOPHON p. 191

Christophe van Gerrewey

CHESS PROBLEMS:

On the paintings of fendry Ekel

11 C H ESS P RO B LE M S

‘Do paintings speak a language?’ And if they do, exactly what would they have to say? In a 1969 book review, Roland Barthes asked exactly the same question: ‘La peinture est-elle un langage?’ 1 Barthes was reviewing the book Scénographie d’un tableau by the French writer Jean-Louis Schefer, in which a single painting is discussed and analysed for pages, in an apparently systematic way, on the basis of semiotics.2 The result of this undertaking, and of its evaluation by Barthes, is self-evident and has even become a cliché. Paintings may well speak a language – but this does not mean that we can unambiguously understand this language. The image of a painting only exists and becomes expressive when we look at and think about it ourselves. As Schefer wrote: ‘The result is that the image never appears “intact” because it is constantly being rewritten by all our readings.’ 3 The painting does not present a code we have to crack. On the contrary, we create the codes ourselves and produce language when we look at a painting. Therefore a painting is a language in the sense that it can be at the origin of an infinite, Babel-like library of texts. The painting does not produce meanings, but allows for the production of meanings for anyone who looks at the painting. Are there still ‘as many books as there are readers’ 4 at the beginning of the twenty-first century, or ‘as many paintings as there are viewers’, as one can summarize the history of modern ideas in a single ‘idée reçue’?

The field that is defined by the work of Fendry Ekel is a good place to start with this question. His field is certainly no longer restricted to the level of painting. The ‘atmosphere’ which is evoked by the work of art has obviously never withdrawn into the object itself, but has always been affected by external factors and influences. However, the modern artist is to a large extent personally responsible – and not necessarily in a painterly way – for manipulating and modelling the creation of this atmosphere.

The effect of the work of art and the way in which it works concentrates around a central but widely extended ‘issue’, which is evoked by different means. Fendry Ekel has perfect mastery of these means so that he is not only a painter, but also a commentator and mentor of his oeuvre. The painting may still form ‘the core of the art’ – it is also like the stone in a

12 C H R I STO P H E V A N G ERRE W EY

ripe fruit: the actual fruit that is consumed, tasted and enjoyed is close to it and sits on the stone’s surface – but is actually something else. A painting never ‘turns into a language’ by itself, but this happens in the head of the viewer. After all, there are more and more texts and – literally – linguistic elements present which influence this transformation; there are more and more clouds between the blue sky of the work and the earth’s surface on which we stand. The problem that is evoked by Ekel’s work is how and why we look through these clouds.

It is well known that the text – and therefore the significance which we attribute to a painting – is determined in the first instance by its title.

After all, a title is no longer self-evident, and in other words, the unequivocal relationship between the title and the painting is broken. On the one hand, this is because of the loss of ‘pure’ representation: a painting is no longer a photograph of reality in which we can clearly see and name what there is to be seen. Painting is no longer figurative, and even if it is, we no longer believe in this figuration. The contemporary surfeit of images and the way in which we become accustomed or lose concentration as a result, means that we need a context to look at a work for more than a few seconds.

Therefore we need information – where possible, surprising information – and the first context comes from the sign hanging on the wall next to the painting which shows the title. One extreme consequence of this awareness is that the painter – and in fact every artist – becomes a conceptual artist. For example, this was said about the work of Luc Tuymans

by Sanford Schwartz in The New York Review of Books: ‘It is the relationship of the titles of his pieces with their respective images, (or, you might say, the pull on him of the forces of conceptual art and of movies) that often generates the real tension of his work.’ 5 The work of Fendry Ekel was certainly influenced by that of Tuymans, but the relationship between the image and the title, and more generally between the image and the information, is of a different nature (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

René Magritte La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) 1929 oil on canvas 64,5 × 94 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) ©2016 Photo SCALA, Florence

13 C H ESS P RO B LE M S

Fig. 1

It is in fact more the case that – with a reference to La trahison des images, Magritte’s best known painting – the image is ‘betrayed’ in different ways.

One good example is the painting The Dutchman Willem Oltmans as George Washington, dating from 2008 (Fig. 2). With the provisional abstraction of the title, the portrait shows a middle-aged man who looks extremely serious and thin with high cheekbones, distinguished, slightly aristocratic and certainly enigmatic. The man stands in front of a brick wall and is traditionally dressed with a scarf; his lips are almost pressed together in a vertical line. The image is such that it can only ‘really’ produce stories because of the title. However, the information given by the title is not simply a revelation or even shocking, as in the case of Tuymans, as when a painting of an elegant and sparsely furnished room is suddenly shown to be entitled Gas Chamber. Ekel goes even further, because the problem only starts with the title and does not immediately reach a climax with a sort of shock reaction. As indicated above, the painting is entitled The Dutchman Willem Oltmans as George Washington. Just as the image is not sufficiently saturated to become ‘discursive’, it is not possible for the unsuspecting and uninformed viewer to ‘simply’ understand this title or transform it into ‘text’. Therefore part of Ekel’s work is to fill this lacuna, which is done by means of interviews, publications, explanations and critical texts such as this one. Thus the viewer or the reader learns that Willem Oltmans (1925–2004) was a controversial Dutch journalist who associated with various ‘dubious’ regimes (such as that of Sukarno, the first president of independent Indonesia). This explains why for a large

14 C H R I STO P H E V A N G ERRE W EY

Fig. 2

Fig. 2

The Dutchman Willem Oltmans as George Washington 2008 gouache and acrylic on paper 135,5 × 102,5 cm

15 C H ESS P RO B LE M S

part of his life, Oltmans was involved in one conflict after another with the government of the country of his birth. His ‘biggest’ achievement might even be his minor role in the film JFK by Oliver Stone, which he owed to the personal theories that he developed about Kennedy’s assassination on the basis of diplomatic meetings. The slightly pathetic figure of Willem Oltmans, whose journalistic integrity was the subject of discussions throughout his life, is shown by Ekel in the usual dignified posture of George Washington. Therefore this introduces a ‘problem’: a journalist who was ostensibly insignificant, who examined the structures of power but also liked to associate with them, is given the emblematic status of the first president of the United States of America.

The reading process of The Dutchman Willem Oltmans as George Washington, which has moved from the painting to the title (and to all related discursive and quasi-journalistic information) necessarily returns to the image. The way in which the reading has come about is coloured and modified by the image and characteristics of this specific style of painting. One of the immediately striking things in Fendry Ekel’s work is the unreserved lucidity in the paintings. As the Belgian art historian Tanguy Eeckhout wrote, Ekel does not use obscure or film-like perspectives, and his work is not characterized either by an explicitly vague or shadowy representation of the subject.6 We see what we see, or we see what the title tells us to see. Nevertheless there is something wrong with the representation, or it becomes clear that it is a representation. It is as though Ekel’s paintings have been produced by an inkjet colour printer in which some of the printer heads have become clogged, while the communication between the hardware and software is disrupted. At the same time, the painted aspect of the image is not denied either: here and there the paint drips down or the background becomes visible. In this way, the language of painting and the language of information come together: things are passed on, but the communication is never quite ‘complete’; there is an interpretation but the interpretation never goes right to the bottom of things; Willem Oltmans was seen to be power hungry, but perhaps he was really also on the trail of a ‘truth’. The cliché that there are ‘as many paintings as there are viewers’ is upheld; it dries like paint against the screen of our appreciation. What is shown explicitly is that the language of paintings, and of images in general, can no longer be left alone and can never be created ‘just like that’.

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ENTRIES

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(1–50)

(A) Michal B. Ron

(5) To Sweet Delight 2011 oil and acrylic on canvas 185,5 × 100 cm

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32 M I C H A L B . RON

In several paintings that Fendry Ekel produced during 2011 in New York and 2012 in Yogyakarta, a pale boy playing the fife presents himself to us frontally. His image haunts the series Tropical Anthem (2012), where he reappears in painting after painting in a dark costume, top hat, bow tie, and Adidas shoes. In To Sweet Delight (2011), an earlier version of the boy emerges in turquoise uniform and a festive hat, repeating that of the boy painted in Édouard Manet’s The Fifer (1866), to whom all of Ekel’s young fifers return. Instead of the boyish face, though, beneath that hat we find a skull, through which the boy’s eyes gaze. In Tropical Anthem #1, skulls are scattered all over the ground, and the boy has slightly changed his posture to rest his left foot on one of them. The repetitions of past images in Ekel’s paintings return like the ‘owl-bats’ that follow the boy in To Sweet Delight, turning him into the ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ while alluding to Francisco de Goya’s etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799).

Ever since Sigmund Freud introduced psychoanalysis, we have been accustomed to viewing the monsters that sleep produces – be they nightmares or dreams – as expressions of the unconscious, disguising wishes of infantile sexuality or suppressed childhood memories. Ekel’s paintings recall memories from our cultural history.

According to Freud, recollected memories should also be handled with caution, for they too, like dreams, may be produced as screens that cover traumatic experiences. In his work Ekel reveals that the production of art is as authentic, and deceptive, as that of dreams and memories, whether personal, cultural or national. Whereas his paintings often adopt the characteristics of dream images, the dominant presence of the boy here calls our attention to the role memory plays in his work. The skull that falls from To Sweet Delight to Tropical Anthem may only hint at the existence of a suppressed traumatic burden.

‘Condensation’ is Freud’s term for the merging of separated identities into a single element in a dream, as so often happens in the images Ekel paints. While in To Sweet Delight Manet’s Fifer merges with the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Goya’s haunted sleeper stands up,

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33 T o Sw e e t D e l igh t

playing the part of death in a macabre performance. In the Tropical Anthem series, the piping boy who wears a top hat is at the same time an adult. Both young and old, he embodies the nineteenth century.

The top hat marks the established and dignified higher class and culture. It recalls those bourgeois men whom Manet depicted at leisure in many of his celebrated modernist paintings. But compared to the boy’s Adidas shoes, the hat conveys a still relatively naive capitalist consciousness. The boy must balance his posture, twisted between playing the instrument while wearing the obsolete top hat and stepping on skulls with his Adidas. He stands between life and death, the present viewer before him and the dead past at his feet.

His polarized image captures a history that is always of children fated to be forefathers, and of an awakening identity that could only recognize itself in retrospect, when it matures.

G. W. F. Hegel, another forefather from the nineteenth century, restricted philosophy to this belated recognition, as he wrote in the preface of The Philosophy of Right (1820):

A further word on the subject of issuing instructions on how the world ought to be: philosophy, at any rate, always comes too late to perform this function. […] When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.1

Ekel plays Hegel in reverse. In Tropical Anthem #2, next to the nineteenth-century playing boy, representing a form of life grown old while still young, sits an owl glaring at the viewer, its wings still closed. Ekel seems to come on the scene too early. He paints a picture of a world before understanding. After dusk falls, art takes philosophy’s place, and paints a gloomy memory-dream, to be recognized in awakening.

1 ‘Um noch über das Belehren, wie die Welt sein soll, ein Wort zu sagen, so kommt dazu ohnehin die Philosophie immer zu spät. […] Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau läßt sie sich nicht verjüngen, sondern nur erkennen; die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.’ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Berlin: Holzinger, 2013 [1820]), 27. Translated by H. B. Nisbet in G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23.

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Tropical Anthem #1 2012 oil and acrylic on canvas 200 × 95 cm

Tropical Anthem #2 2012 oil and acrylic on canvas 240,5 × 122,5 cm

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(C) Dávid Fehér Precarious Identities of

On two Portraits BY Fendry Ekel

49 P RE C A R I O U S I DENT I T I ES

While I was looking through the catalogues and images of Fendry Ekel, I had the impression that he was consciously investigating the fluidity of historical and cultural identities and meanings. Ekel employs archetypal motifs with precarious reminiscences. His enigmatic, sometimes even surrealistic paintings refer to general questions of European culture and modernism. The tradition of European painting can be seen as the general, but ambiguous, basis of Fendry Ekel’s art. He is an artist with postcolonial origins, who immigrated to the Netherlands at a young age and internalized its painterly tradition. The sensitive questions of migration and transitional (or even transnational) identities are not only major themes of his art, but also important metaphors for his artistic practice. In his paintings he evokes the ‘migration’ of references and meanings, mobilizing our collective (unconscious) knowledge of cultural topoi.

This is also true for his portraits of Charlie Chaplin and Leon Trotsky, two ‘immigrants’, who had no relationship with each other, but are now rendered side by side as free associations in a series of paintings. These can be seen as an endless atlas, containing floating images of cultural memory. Fendry Ekel’s historically conscious art can be described as a kind of post-conceptual painting, based on a free use of found documents, which thematizes suppressed historical traumas. His attitude is comparable with the artistic strategies of Gerhard Richter or Luc Tuymans.1 The portraits of Chaplin and Trotsky can be related to several other portraits painted by Ekel – The Dutchman Willem Oltmans as George Washington (2008), Young Gropius as Soldier (2007), Mata Hari as Double Spy (2008), and some other paintings, which depict Piet Mondrian (Red, Yellow, Blue & Pink. Man with Beard, 2008), Franz Kafka ( Bohemian Twins, 2013) and Bobby Fischer among others. The diversity of the list of names tells us something about the rhizomatic character of Fendry Ekel’s imaginary ‘hall of fame’. It is impossible to find any direct ‘linear’ relation between this wide range of personalities besides their historical importance. However, the way Ekel

(20), (21) Bohemian Twins 2013 p. 122/123

1 Fendry Ekel was a participant at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam during the years 1998 and 1999. Luc Tuymans was at that time an artistic advisor in the Rijksakademie’s painting department.

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50 D á vi d F e h é r

presents them has something in common: most of the depicted people in the paintings play a role; their personality seems to be divided (the division being marked by the word ‘as’ in the titles). The face of Willem Oltmans, a Dutch diplomat, is combined with the portrait of George Washington, as if Oltmans’ face were projected onto a classical state portrait. In another painting Walter Gropius wears the uniform of a soldier, taking up a certain role within society; his rigid, skeleton-like figure can be compared with the frozen outlines of a memorial, which evokes the ambivalence of building and destruction.

The figure of the spy Mata Hari is doubled, just like the face of Franz Kafka. Duplication and repetition of the same image may recall stereo photography or the multiplied images of pop art; however, these associations remain superficial. In my view the ‘schizophrenic’ divisions or repetitions of the depicted can be interpreted as the de(con)struction and the ‘de-stabilization’ of their identity. The presentation of the doubled, divided or even hybridized person, the precarious roleplay seems to be a reflection on the logic of pictorial representation and the dialectics of portraiture.

Roleplay and duplication can also be found within the portraits of Chaplin and Trotsky, though in a more indirect way. In order to circumscribe this, we must situate the paintings in a more general context. In both portraits, Fendry Ekel evokes not only important personalities, but an archetypal form of representation: the genre of the portrait. It is rooted in the tradition of icons and cult images, and therefore has sacral connotations. The history of both, icon and portrait, can be seen in an even broader context: the long history of the representation of the human face, as has been recently discussed

by Hans Belting in an anthropological context.2 Although it is impossible here to recapitulate the complex history of the human face, we must mention some aspects that may be productive for the interpretation of Ekel’s portraits. The ancient Greek original of the word face ( pros-opon), just like its German variant (Ge-sicht) refers to visibility – it is seen or it is being looked at. The

2 Hans Belting, Faces: Eine Geschichte des Gesichts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013).

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51 P RE C A R I O U S I DENT I T I ES

face can be described as a mask-like ‘public surface’ of the self, a well-constructed and controlled image of a suggested identity of a ‘social being’. However, as has been discussed widely in the literature, the face itself can be used as a mask. Erving Goffman’s term ‘facework’ refers to the process of creating an image (imago) of the self as a kind of self-representation within social communication.

The construction of our face/mask is analogous to an illusionistic pictorial surface. Émile Durkheim uses the phrase Homo duplex to describe the duality of a person; the shift between a face’s instinctive and its socially formed character. The self-created face/mask can also be called the persona. It is mask and person in one, with both a fictional and a sign-character. This latter property of the persona can be linked to Thomas Macho’s conception of a ‘facial society’ (quoted

by Belting). In a ‘facial society’, people consume mediatized faces: ‘With his face turned anonymous, the viewer of the screen consumes faces onto which society has projected its power structures’, writes Belting (author’s translation).3 The mediatized ‘prominent’ faces are treated as brands of an endless circulation of signs and simulacra.

The represented faces – despite their virtual character – bear some similarities with their iconographic predecessors. The enthusiastic behavior towards them can be compared with the behavior towards cult images and icons or the portraits of totalitarian regimes.

The most important analogy for Fendry Ekel’s portrait series, Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits (1972), can be placed in such a context.

Richter installed a series of images in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale as a long frieze: the greyish paintings depict prominent personalities, who are perceived as icons of European culture.

The paintings look like enlarged identity card photographs, phantoms, which circumscribe a cultural identity. They can be seen as counterparts of the endlessly multiplied celebrity snapshots of American pop art, or even the spectacularly enlarged mug-shot images of the Thirteen Most Wanted Men (1964) by Andy Warhol. Both ‘halls of fame’ (explicitly intended as such by Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol)

3 Belting, Faces, 40.

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52 D á vi d F e h é r

can be interpreted as reflections on the ideological implications of installing and exhibiting the human face in a cultic context, the phenomena of (re)sacralization of the human face and the power of images as a tool of politics. The portraits by Fendry Ekel can be related to this act of reinterpreting the forms of the state portrait and investigating the anthropology of the human face. Ekel’s portraits find their roots in the tradition of historical painting (and portrait galleries), just like Gerhard Richter’s series.

There is hardly any relationship to be traced between Charlie Chaplin and Leon Trotsky. The two portraits do not form a diptych; nor do they refer to one another. Nevertheless there are some similarities, which suggest that it might make sense to study them together.

Both Chaplin and Trotsky are Jews and migrants. Both are depicted in the images at a young age and without the beards which later became iconic; they sport stylish haircuts instead. It seems to be no accident that Ekel presents both figures at a young age, using photographic prototypes, which show them both atypically. He investigates icons of our cultural history before they became icons. The omission of their famous attributes leads to the uniformization of their faces, just as Wilhelm Waetzoldt writes in his book on portraits: ‘The beardlessness makes the men look alike’.4 The absence of Chaplin’s famous (Hitler-like) moustache emphasizes the difference between Chaplin as a person and his fictional character, even though the greyish tones of the depicted face recall a mask or a theatrical make-up. The tension between the fictionalized face of Chaplin as a brand and his own person leads back to the above-mentioned questions of playing roles and the divided identities of Homo duplex. The world-famous persona of Charlie Chaplin – who occurs regularly in film close-ups – can be seen as a system of signs consumed by the audience of the film industry; a symptomatic example of the pre-history of our ‘facial society’.

4 Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Die Kunst des Porträts (Leipzig: F. Hirt & Sohn, 1908), 212.

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53 P RE C A R I O U S I DENT I T I ES

The portrait of Leon Trotsky hints at an even more complicated structure of references. Trotsky lived in exile for political reasons.

In this sense, his portrait, painted in a quasi-official manner, can be seen as a state portrait in reverse; instead of a political authority, it depicts someone who was persecuted by those in power. Fendry Ekel studied the biography of Trotsky carefully, visited his former house in Mexico and dedicated several paintings to him. Among them is Young Trotsky as International Lover (2008), which refers to Trotsky’s short affair with Frida Kahlo, thus relating his character to the history of painting as well as leftist ideology.

In every portrait, Fendry Ekel depicts the hairstyle of Trotsky in a special way. The abstract, ornamental composition, recalling a stylized form of a wig or a brain, is a citation of Milton Glaser’s famous Dylan Poster (1966), where the hair is transformed into a vibrant, psychedelic structure. (The beard of Mondrian is transformed similarly in a painting by Fendry Ekel.) What makes this reference to the Dylan Poster even more interesting is that Milton Glaser used a profile self-portrait of Marcel Duchamp as a prototype for his poster (Profile Self-Portrait, 1959). The outlined profile of Duchamp – which looks like a shadow cast on a surface – can be seen as a ‘signature’ of the artist. Victor I. Stoichita relates this profile portrait to the famous Duchamp collage entitled Wanted: $2000 Reward (1923), a manipulated ‘wanted poster’ including a fictional double mug-shot of Duchamp, a photograph in frontal view and one in profile. According to Stoichita, Duchamp disrupts representation through reversing the position of the profile image, which in this case ‘does not promote an affirmation of identity’.5 It must be more than a mere accident that the photographic prototype of Fendry Ekel’s Trotsky portrait is a mug-shot picture from Russian secret police files. The profile portrait is part of a double mug-shot. It is a fragment of a constellation, and therefore insuffi-

5 Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 226–228.

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Charlie Chaplin 2012 oil and acrylic on canvas 135 × 100 cm

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(11) Leon Trotsky 2012 oil and acrylic on canvas 135 × 100 cm

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Investigation #7:

FENDRY EKEL’S ART OF BLENDING

(G) Franz Engel

(28) Investigation #7 2013 oil and acrylic on canvas 225 × 160 cm