11.06.2015-02.20.2016
Storm Tharp
PILGRIMS
Storm Tharp’s ink portraits are like altered vanitas, in which the proud busts recall the classical portrait tradition, while bearing decomposed, recomposed, stained, and deformed faces, as if to inform us that presence and dignity do not emanate so much from a suppressed coldness as from the extreme emotionality that Tharp portrays in these faces.
Emotional, the gazes of unexpected gentleness spring from the distorted faces and surprise with their calm strength whoever dares to meet them. And a kind of empathy then settles in, opening the way to introspective communication, an experience of otherness in which universal suffering of being resonates, though its form is nonetheless unique to every story.
Tharp is not playing at being provocative, but is rather of that vein of artists for whom affect is an essential element. In their journey of initiation, the quest of his pilgrims is without a doubt spiritual: an existential struggle in search of the self, in a world in which one must endlessly try out faces and masks, occupy the terrain, and multiply online identities, without losing the roots of one’s own entity.
His portraits seem to make up a family collection, in which a radical glitch at some point exteriorized the disturbing or fascinating interiority of the members represented. With Tharp, the wanderings, wounds, or rough edges of the soul are no longer monstrosities to be erased but on the contrary vivid finery, providing these gazes the honesty from which they draw their strength.