Artist's Statement

The pictures are in the tradition of still life painting. According to some, still life painting stems from the private work done by the scenic painters of the ancient Greek theatre. Still life painting was used as an ornament in homes, a descriptive image displaying what you could find within the home, "what we have" and "what there is."

In my pictures I take a similar point of view but I exchange the word "world" for "home." Most of the images begin with the simplicity of flowers in a vase, but often lead into another story concerning the time we live in, a certain country, a certain people, their joys, their struggles and their obstacles.

I use historical references of words and places, objects and images. The flowers and vases often come from life in the present, yet sometimes they come from history, as in the roses from a mosaic in Ravenna or a beautiful Minoan vase. A way to make use of history in the present, make it tangible.

The paintings are in the ancient technique of fresco painting. Over the years I have experimented and have tried to learn this technique. Beginning with a canvas, I use plaster and wall-compound as a ground. When this is dry I add pure dust pigment with water, saturating the color into the ground. It is a very slow process to build up a color; maybe they should be called "fresco lungo" or "festina lente" - "hurry slowlies". The final picture is very durable, delicate and portable, with an ability to take in and give as much light as possible. Luminous color. I love color and I love to see.

These pictures are the results of my long road of portrait painting, still life painting and storytelling. They are Love, Love and Protest paintings, based on emotions, observations and research. More simply, they are an artist's points of view, visual poems, reflections and concerns for the world we live in, "what we have."

Curator's Statement

by Nicole Eisenman

I met Mark 25 years ago and knew right away he was an extraordinary painter. Mark has a kinship to Giotto, and Matisse, in the strong graphics and color -which has the kind of depth you only experience with fresco- the painting's surfaces are just so unbelievably beautiful, flat, raw and seductive. But it is Mark's deep political, spiritual and moral feelings that determine the content of his paintings, everything symbolizes something else, you enter into a maze of meaning which is at times mystical, unsettled and often starkly political.

I have a lovely still life of Mark's. A bleached out coral vase, representing the oceans, bears a loose and unruly spray of Asclepius, a flower named after the Greek god of healing and which has been used medicinally for thousands of years. The painting is a prayer and also a remarkably simple plea: heal our oceans.

Many of the paintings function like this, elegant and sophisticated pictograms. I am a devoted follower of Mark's work, and the optimism it possesses.

Artist's Bio

Mark Turgeon, who holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design from 1987, has spent most of the past twenty years as an artist, rooted in New York City. He has had solo exhibitions at the Knitting Factory, New York, NY, 1988; The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY, 1997 and the Dillon Gallery, New York, NY, 1999. Other group exhibitions include the M.S. Gallery, Hartford, CT; Paul Mellon Arts Center at Choate School, Wallingford, CT; Bucheon Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Allan Stone Gallery, Grand Salon, Jack Tilton Gallery, Postmasters, and Esso Gallery in New York, NY. He has organized and been part of a number of spoken word/performance evenings in places such as CB's 313 Gallery; Fallen Angels Erotic Cabaret; Bell Café and McGovern's Bar. In collaboration with Edisa Weeks/Delirious Dance Co. they created two window box performances for Chashama Theatre. He has created sets and props and posters and significant graphics for many of his friends' theatre companies, and film projects, balancing the solitary time of study and creating art. He would like to thank everybody, especially his family and friends for their love and encouragement, and everyone at the CUE Art Foundation. Thank You.

Curator's Bio

Nicole Eisenman has been living and working in New York for the last 20 years. She began in New York as a commercial mural painter and had her first show in 1992 at Nicola Tyson's now infamous project space, Trial Balloon, New York, NY. She showed her work at Tilton Gallery, New York, NY for 10 years doing mixed media installations, sculpture, video, drawing and painting. In 1993 she left the Tilton Gallery and began to focus solely on painting. She is represented by Leo Koenig Gallery in New York City, Susan Vielmetter Gallery in Culver City, CA and Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin. Eisenman's work is represented in museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, The Modern Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; The Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA. She is also represented in many major collections.

Mark Turgeon: Allegories of Bad Government and Good People

by Richard Milazzo 

I

I've known Mark Turgeon since 1993 or 1994, when he worked as the superintendent of a buildingon Greene Street in SoHo (when SoHo was SoHo rather than the horrible shoppingemporium it has become today), and kept the basement as a vast studio space forhis painting.  I missed the period,in the late 1980s, when he was painting numerous tumultuous dark portraits ofhis friends (and some commissions), in the spirit of the Russian, Chaïm Soutine,and the English painters, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, but which remain, tothis day, uniquely and fiercely his own. It was a genuinely tormented vision that seemed to pull from the psychicdepths the subject's anima (or animus) - her or his deepest spirit - and deposit it likean archaeological dig on the tortured surface of the painting.  ‘Dig,' rather than ‘find,' because thepicture always seemed to be a living work in progress, the process of findingthe essence of the human being inside the person (as persona) being embodied in every stroke of thepainting.  Among the sitters weresuch considerable figures as Ross Bleckner (himself a psychic digger [Fig. 1] -I am thinking, here, too, of de Kooning's, figure of the clam digger); Suzanne,Basquiat's girlfriend of the early 1980s (Fig. 2), who, at the time, went bythe stage name of ‘Ruby Desire'; and the famous illustrator, Jordan Isip (Fig.3).

But I'm getting way ahead of myself.  Mark Turgeon was born on March 25,1965, in Hartford, Ct.  When he wasdoing these portentous portraits, he was only in his early twenties, hard asthat may be to believe.  Imaginehaving someone that young staring directly into your soul, becoming not onlythe "keeper of your secrets,"[i]as he puts it, but knowing when the picture was done only when he "would seeidentical for an epiphanic moment."[ii]  His family's roots go back to FrenchQuebec on his father's side and to Sicily, to Floridia, just outside Siracusa,on his mother's side.  That this(Arab-Norman-Aragonese) culture, which has been conquered many times over sincePhoenician times, still roils in his blood can be seen in some of the hybridstill life / ‘landscapes' he makes to this very day - pictures of Palermo,Sicily, and the sea, with an embattled sun trying to break through themetaphysical clouds of politics and history.

He took a B.F.A. at R.I.S.D. (Rhode IslandSchool of Design) in 1987, majoring not only in painting but in fashion andillustration, which, Turgeon believes, made him more well-rounded than if hehad limited his studies to fine arts. When he graduated, he got himself over to Europe almost immediately, andlived there for six months, traveling around Germany, France, Austria, Hungary,and mostly Italy, which he loved. He lived in Italy until January 1988.  When he got back to the States, he moved to New York City,and worked as an illustrator. Among several cover illustrations he did was one for Salman Rushdie, forhis book, Shame (Vintage / Random House,1989) - a job which, according to Turgeon, permanently lost him his job as anillustrator in New York; because of his association with Rushdie, no one, fromthat point on, would hardly hire him again, this, from fear.  You would have thought he had written TheSatanic Verses himself - but fearful andtimid is the world we live in, and the smaller those worlds the greater, itwould seem, our trepidations.  Thevery last one he managed to do was for the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa,for his novel The Storyteller (FarrarStraus and Giroux, 1989) (Fig. 4).

He began, then, to work for galleries, such asCharles Cowles and Salvatore Ala, and remembers vividly installing a show forSigmar Polke at the Brooklyn Museum in the early 1990s.  He loved the work and the artist, whomhe met and respected greatly.  Thecollaged aspect of Turgeon's own paintings reflects, to this day, Polke'sinfluence, at least, in a general way. But it wasn't too long before he became jaded as he watched the ways,and became all too familiar with the inner workings, of the art world. 

He went on, then, to work in the theater world,becoming house manager at Theater Row and AHM at the Daryl Roth theater for itsproduction of De la guarda (Argentineslang meaning ‘Guardian Angel'). Here, the world of appearances unfolds itself in its most transient formbut also in a relentlessly methodical way.  Might this not account for the scenographic quality ofTurgeon's later pictures, where visual elements referring to real world eventsshift in and out of the same space as literary and mythic ones in a kind ofexistential collage?  He, in fact,sees a relation between his still life pictures of flowers (and other mixedobjects) and still life painting in ancient Greek theatre - "when playwrightswere magicians and scenic painters had real power"[iii]to conjure and induce visions.

He proudly admits that Modigliani and van Goghwere his college heroes, and that when he came back from visiting thewheatfields of Auvers, between his sophomore and junior years - Auvers is wherevan Gogh lived for the last months of his life and where he eventually shothimself -, he brought back with him a sprig of wheat which he has always wantedto paint and which he has had to repair several times so fragile is it.  We, in fact, begin to see the figuralinfluence of Modigliani and the color influence of van Gogh (and Matisse) inthe next body of portraits he does in the 1990s - which resemble the previousportraits in their restlessness and unruly formal nature but are overflowingwith vibrant colors.  This is theperiod when I meet him, in the mid-1990s, when he does my portrait - a colorfulthing, full of stripes, bright contusions and momentary glimpses into a soulstill recovering from a grueling divorce.

He is still working in the basement on GreeneStreet, with his books and the antique dolls he has begun to collect and paintand which even begin to inform some of the portraits; and his abiding‘interest' in things literary manifests itself in the poetry he is alsowriting.  He will work in thisbasement, like Dostoevsky's underground man, for ten years, until he moves hisstudio to his apartment on Broome Street, sometime in 1998.  He will also visit Italy, in the Fall -Rome, in particular - in this year, and afterwards, he will paint almostexclusively in fresco style.  Theway he explains his fresco technique to me[iv]is that he applies pure pigment to wall compound laid down on canvas, sprayingthe surface with water as he works and making it simultaneously more fragileand durable. "The final picture is very durable, delicate and portable, with anability to take and give as much light as possible. Luminous color.  I love color and I love to see."[v]

Here, when he speaks of ‘seeing' I am sure healso means seeing into things, getting to the bottom of them politically aswell as visually.  Seeing, here,means not only something phenomenologically pure in the sense of perception perse, but being alert to things in the realworld that surround us, that threaten to overwhelm us, to pull the proverbialwool over our eyes if we do not remain ever-conscious, ever-vigilant, giventhat we are part of this world, even, or rather, especially, as artists andwriters.  I am in Mark's apartmenton Broome Street not one moment before he is handing me a book about 9/11 - TheNew Pearl Harbor - or a DVD on thecorporate takeover of America.  Butthis will not prevent him from also handing me a book on Lorenzetti's PalazzoPubblico cycle of frescoes in Siena, which have served as inspiration for severalof the most recent works.  On thewall, in fact, is a picture entitled The Sit-in (2007), a later version of another painting called OrangeAlert (2004), with the words at the topreading ‘Fear - Avarice, Arrogance, Vainglory - Cruelty,' and, at the bottom,translated from the original Latin: "Because each seeks only his own good, in this city Justice is subvertedto Tyranny; wherefore, along this road nobody passes without fearing for hislife, since there are robberies outside and inside the city gates."  These are the words inscribed inLorenzetti's fresco, Allegory of Bad Government, in between the segments designated ‘The Countrysideof Fear' and ‘The Unjust City.' They might very well describe Bush's administration and the new,post-9/11 world he has helped to create today.

The tenement apartment is hung floor to ceiling- salon style - with his new 20 x 16" (a size he has always favored) frescopaintings, books from wall to wall, and table tops in the bedroom, kitchen -which is the room you walk into from the exterior hall - and studio (Fig. 5)are filled to overflowing with everything from ‘old' objects from Africa to themost inexpensive knick-knacks from the ghettos of Brazil.  Books, music albums (33's, mostly),African masks and necklaces, canvas, jars, cans, bottles and other paintingmaterials overwhelm the studio space which is no bigger than a small walk-incloset.  A bicycle is parked in akitchen that is bursting with fruit and spices - he obviously loves to cook -with an army of Jewish (falasha orestranged) Ethiopian clay figures from the 1970s brushing my arm as I takenotes.  "Do you think I shouldinclude a recipe in the catalogue?" he asks me.  "Listen, you know I love to cook almost as much as I love tomake art."[vi]  In the middle of this, he offers me oneof the Ethiopian figures, a rabbi reading the Torah.  "Here, here's a great recipe."  "Did you make it up yourself?"  "Of course. Look, you marinate a hanger steak in rose water - and that's the key,the rose water - with cumin, crushed fennel seeds, red cayenne pepper, and alittle salt and olive oil.  Now yougrill it.  Then you slice it anddistribute the pieces over some pasta, which you then place on a plate ofraisins and pine nuts that have been soaking in extra virgin olive oil.  Over all of this you squeeze the juiceof a blood orange."[vii]  This last flourish is utterly Sicilianin character.

As I stare ahead, behind the armies of spicebottles and dusty antique figures, I see a painting of a beautiful yellowsunflower against a red background, with a ‘watermelon' table beneath it.  Before I can ask him about it, my eyesreload and I see a string of five Tibetan prayer flags hanging above therefrigerator.  As I study them,Turgeon pulls out a figurine he found while walking along the beach in Modello(a resort just outside Palermo.) He explains that it may be a prehistoric reclining stone figure of amother suckling her child.  Here,in this environment, ‘home' and story are everything - even in their mosteccentric and unique forms:  "Thepictures are in the tradition of still life painting.  Originally, still life painting was used as an ornament inhomes.  A descriptive imagedisplaying what you could find within the house, ‘what we have, what thereis.'  In my pictures I take asimilar point of view but I exchange the word ‘world' for home.  Most of the images begin with thesimplistic sense of flowers in a vase, but often lead into another storyconcerning the time we live in, a certain country, a certain people, and their joys,their struggles, their obstacles."[viii]

The walls of the bedroom are filled withpictures, books and a small bed that resembles the one Paul Bowles maintainedas a matter of indifference in his (awful) modern building in Tangiers.  In various niches of the room can beespied the terra cotta figures of the Bambara people of Africa.  There is also an old, powder-blue, ‘50stypewriter, an Everest, which he hasmounted on a pedestal-like, metal structure.  He says he likes to stand when he types.  To me Turgeon (Fig. 6) is like a crossbetween a nomadic Berger from the High Atlas mountains - which is where Ipresently find myself - and an Italian immigrant dock worker right out of ablack and white movie from the 1940s or 50s.  The little cap he wears, even in the apartment sometimes,reinforces the latter image.  Hehas inscribed on the typewriter in Tibetan and gold leaf letters the words Mother-of-the-Universe.  Likepen and ink, paint brush and paint, the typewriter is for Turgeon a powerfulinstrument to convey meaning, which he relishes.  They are the magical sources of arbitrary signs whosemeaning - often both poetic and political in nature - is anything butarbitrary.

The sound of

                        Sundaymorning

                        Isin the Air,

                        Acolored breeze,

                        Thereare many floating kites

                        Dancing,telling stories

                        Inthe Air,

                        Isee five, six

                        Paperwings

                        Swaying

                        Inthe grey clouded sky,

                        Thereare slow black vultures too

                        Hoveringabove them,

                        Onechild

                        Challengesthe beasty birds

                        Inheight and happiness

                        Withhis soaring kite[ix]

I do not think it is entirely an accident thatTurgeon's next form of work to keep life and limb together will be as a signmaker.  He will, in fact, start asign painting business in 2001, which he maintains to this day.  He speaks to me about his experiencesat Caffé Dante - possibly the only genuine and genuinely cosmopolitan café inthe city and one to which I myself have been going since the early 1970s:  "for a few days, you are part of theoperation; you're privy to all the space - the back, the basement, thealleyway, there is no part that you do not know about.  And, of course, you have theopportunity to meet all different kinds of people from different countries.  Your work is a little like aperformance piece."[x]  Aware of the hundred-year-old traditionof Caffé Dante, rather than making a new sign for them - which would make himmore money -, he advises them instead to restore the gold in the old letteringon the windows.

Not the smartest move if you're thinking purelyin terms of business.  But this isconsistent with the person I know. Next to the intensity of his work, Turgeon's career has always seemed tome like an afterthought.  AlthoughR.I.S.D. is considered a power school by the aspiring, I do not think he hasever really wanted to play the game. So, consequently, he has always found himself outside the arena, not somuch looking in, with his nose proverbially rubbing up against the glass, butgoing elsewhere culturally to find sustenance - to the people in his books andin his life, to the people he has met in his travels, to the people he thinksof as the embodiment of goodness and hope.  People are what power Turgeon's art:  "These pictures are the results of mylong road of portrait painting and still life painting and storytelling.  They are Love, and Love and Protestpaintings, based on emotions, observations and research.  More simply, they are points of view,visual poems, reflections and concerns for the world we live in, ‘what wehave.'"[xi]  Friends and friendship mean everythingto him, and he let's me know several times that he would not have had me writethis text if he did not consider me one and did not like my way ofthinking.  (Here, in Morocco, wherepeople have so much less by way of material goods practice more intimate,immediate forms of friendship that we in the trans-Atlantic Maghreb have longago lost touch with.  We see thisin the boys who hold hands in public, even as they cross the now overly touristicPlace Djemaa el-Fina, or as my guide, Majid, calls it, Doomsday Square.)[xii]

While Turgeon had shows of the portraits at TheKnitting Factory in 1988 and, ten years later, in 1997, at the Cathedral of St.John the Divine (Fig. 7) - both alternative spaces -, in New York, along withseveral other one-person and group shows, this hardly reflects awell-orchestrated career.  This, Ithink, because he never thought in those terms.  Was it indifference or a kind of inverted elitism which theartist has indulged?  Did he lookdown his nose at the art world, because of its star-system and arriviste behavior, which he had witnessed so much of, or washe one of the many more than worthy individuals who was cast to the side?  Has the art world become soimpenetrable in some ways - at least that is the way it can sometimes seem toan ‘outsider' - that it will especially not welcome those who are theworthiest?  And if your name doesnot will out clearly at the end of a subtle game of Chinese whispers, do yousimply look inward and then back out at the larger world?  It takes a special kind of artist topersist, to look beyond the immediate obstacle course placed in front of him orher, and to see that which comprises the vital signs not only of art but oflife.

II

"I usehistorical references of words and places, objects and images.  The flowers and vases often come fromlife in the present, yet sometimes they come from history as in the roses froma mosaic in Ravenna or a beautiful Minoan vase.  A way to make use of history for the present, make ittangible."[xiii]  The fresco technique alone lends thecolors a luminosity that oil painting could never achieve.  With the invention of oil painting,Vasari and his generation of artists knew what they were leaving behind.  And often it is that way:  while the newer technologies mayrepresent new business opportunities, they often cannot replace the older formsand ways of doing things.  The‘new' CDs sound tinny when compared to the old 33's - which any connoisseur ofmusic will tell you - and the 33's cannot compare to the vinyl records weplayed on our old hand-wound Victrolaswhen we were children.  Although Iuse a computer, I write long-hand, and still have not relinquished my oldportable Olivetti.  I am superstitious when it comes toholding on to objects that once held so much personal meaning for me.  Turgeon holds on to a sprig of wheatfrom Auvers as if it had magical powers. 

Turgeon's paintings are a compendium of imagesof things that are common or precious, natural or man-made, tragic or full ofjoy, but that are always precious to him, and that are invariably, if notexclusively, filtered through flowers and vases as their metaphorical‘containers.'  Floral depictionsfrom all walks of life abound:  amedieval bee in a Ravenna rose; vases full of flowers quoted from Manet andMonet; a Neopolitan vase and a Persian rose; flowers from the Primavera (Spring); lilies of the valley with a tomato; SundayMorning Vespas with the Dalai Lama; the Infanta's flowers; a sunflower with anEmperor moth; Nymphea in a Fire Vase; peonies in a sleeping Panda vase, in aplum blossom vase, and in a longevity vase; Cuba lilies and wild Sicilianirises; Aesclepius in a colorless coral vase and in a Hopi vase; poppies in aPalm Luck Vase; Goddess Flowers on a Time Machine in the Sea; sunflowers in aWorld-Egg Vase; Three God Monte and drug-dice.  And this merely reflects the contents of some of Turgeon'stitles.  In the subtlest of ways,he tells us that he is thinking about China, for example, both as a historicalsource of beauty but also in the critical light of the way it has become asource of cheap labor outsourced and exploited globally by corporations.  So the paintings, which contain thesimplest of things - flowers and vases - become themselves larger ‘containers'of contemporary Baudelairean fleurs du mal.  As such, we have towonder if the many bees in his pictures are there as reminders of theirdisappearance possibly due to the lethal rays emitted by cell phones and theirsatellite sources - caught as it were in the fatal web of technology which hasspread like a pandemic over the whole earth.  The more means of communication we generate, the less ablewe seem to resolve our conflicts - which steadily become more global.  Even the paintings with the simplestthings are almost always replete with subtle references or allusions to apolitical event or the larger human condition.

There are titles and paintings that are farmore explicitly ominous, but always also, in the end, hopeful - paintings like GloriaMundi, derived from Jan Breugel, that tellus that everything (particularly fame and glory) is transitory but lifecontinues.  The titles also reflectthe caveats his paintings issue and their ideological motives:  Iron Age, Critical Path, Pride, TheOncoming Storm, Fair Trade, Wake Up and Smell the Water Lilies, Sisters of Mercy, and Pie in the Face. Turgeon's own descriptions of the paintings, which function like diaryentries and which he keeps together with Polaroid images of the works, give usthe flavor not only of his critical thinking but of his subtle appreciation forthe smallest details of life.  Inbehalf of Favela Favola (GhettoFable), he writes:  "This is asmall figurine I purchased in Rio de Janeiro from a folk artist from the northof Brasil.  The painting is thestory of how people from the countryside come to the city looking for a betterlife.  It is their first night inthe favela that overlooks thecity of Rio.  A hummingbird kissesthe orchid in the window.  Goldleaf letters are gilded onto the picture. On the back of the painting is a quote from Pablo Neruda's IslaNegra:  ‘Afterwards, I asked the others, the women, the men, whatthey were doing so confidently and how they learned to live.  They did not actually answer, they wenton dancing and living.'"  Here areothers that caught my reading eye: 

Fair Trade: "Peonies in a pre-Columbian monkey bowls from Peru, like a boat withsail.  In the background aninternational symbol for fair trade products in 22k gold leaf.  At bottom right are Columbus andVespucci from a 16th century German drawing."

ColumbusDay:  "A Pre-Columbian gold disc in 24k gold leaf as floating vase for thesunflowers.  In the background is a1950's hand-embroidered children's shirt from Guatemala that I own.  In the foreground right, aPre-Columbian funerary vase surrounded by graffiti from Caracas, Venezuela, ona recent Columbus Day, now called Indigenous Peoples Day, when they tore downthe statue of Columbus.  The statueis painted into the design of the children's shirt.  Another perspective of another day on Earth."

Plum Blossomsin a Plum Blossom Vase:  "Real plum blossoms from the farmer'smarket in a museum ginger jar from China. The vase is a symbol of good luck. Plum blossoms - sexuality, vitality.  Cracked ice motif - successful in old age."

GladiolaBianca:  "A white gladiola in a simple glass vase, one of myfavorites, now broken, that Jim & Sara had given me many years ago."

Sisters ofMercy:  "This painting began because I wanted to re-use this ancientblue-glass vase discovered in 1834 in Pompeii.  I had used it once before in another painting which was soldvery quickly from me.  Freshpeonies about to open sit in the vase. I was working on the picture as the Tsunami of 2005 hit.  The extreme and sudden devastation wasoverwhelming to me.  During thechimes of midnight, New Year's Eve, 2005, I was thinking about all the victimsof the disaster and added the Three Graces, also from Pompeii, as something ofa blessing and hope.  Some timelater I realized the connection between the two civilizations, an unannouncedblanketing of life and culture by nature."

Pie in theFace: "The target-like image is a 13th century image of the cosmos.  The Comedia dell'Arte figure dancingaround the earth is the joyful singer, reveler, which is the originaldefinition of the word.  The guyswith the pies are taken from an early Renaissance image of somebody beingstoned.  Instead of stones, theyhave cream pies.  Cream pies in theface are more humorous than stones. Having spelled the Greek word for comedy incorrectly was the completionof the painting and an accident."

The Origin ofthe Rose:  "After the destruction of the 1500 year old Bamiyan Buddha Iwas inspired to make this picture. I replaced the Buddha with a cosmic dancer image from a sculpture fromIndia.  The images of the graphicroses are from weavings and embroideries from a nomadic peoples from that partof the world.  The rose floweroriginates from there, Central Asia. It is a painting that celebrates Women."

In a painting called Quebec, Turgeon renders an image from Piero della Francescaof the Ideal City and places a barbed wire fence in front of it.  In the foreground, he paints the clashbetween the police and the protesters during the G8 conference in Quebec in2001.  Among the protestors can beidentified two men with African masks, the barefoot Fritellino from the Comediadell'Arte, and a figure in a Hopi mask. Abstract world events - they tend to become abstract because they aremediated or occur at a distance from us - are recast into carnivalesque dramasof right and wrong.  Multi-culturalimagery, not so much as a politically correct strategy but as an ideologicalmanifestation of universal conditions. Instead of a vase and flowers, we have a piazza or field with actors orplayers reenacting in aesthetical but more immediate terms the struggle betweenthe dominant and the disenfranchised, the powerful and the powerless, thewealthy and the poor.

In some of themost recent works, such as Stand Still Life Painting and Critical Path, Turgeon has violated the stricter or narrower termsof the allegorical tensions in his work by placing the flowers (and theirvases) on the tops of stacks of books, turning these piles into pedestals.  While the ideological meaning of thesebooks is clear - books such as Goya's The Disasters of War, Daily Life in Medieval Times, Civilization or Barbarism, AmericanDynasty, Was is a Force ThatGives Us Meaning, Stolen Harvest, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird, and Neruda's Residence on Earth -, by placing these instruments or ‘containers' ofcritical ideas and knowledge beneath the vases of flowers, Turgeon converts (orinverts) the allegorical and humanist terms of ideological struggle into apurely dialectical one between seemingly more absolute and relativevalues.  Are flowers and art inthemselves inherently more beautiful or even more ‘natural' than ideas; or areideas - the process of thinking itself - as an inherent part of nature, subjectto a value-free ethics of perception? If ideas are more absolute, than why or how can a good one (as well as abad one) be the source of change and change the world?  Can nature be trusted with our ideas ofgood and evil; can government be trusted to regulate our relation to the good(or goodness, i.e., morality) and nature? These are some of the questions Turgeon's pictures pose, even as theyconfigure luminous visions, both political and aesthetical in nature.

Richard Milazzo

New York City - Basel - Morocco,

June-July 2007

[i]Conversation with the artist, 550 Broome St., New YorkCity, May 31, 2007.

[ii]Ibid.

[iii]Ibid.

[iv]Ibid.

[v]Artist's statement, n.d.

[vi]Conversation with the artist, N.Y.C., May 31, 2007, op.cit.

[vii]Ibid.

[viii]Artist's statement.

[ix]Mark Turgeon, "Simplicidade," Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,2004.

[x]Conversation with the artist, op. cit.

[xi]Artist's statement.

[xii]Literally, the place where the condemned were broughtduring Medieval times to be beheaded by the gross, their heads then pickled andmounted on the city walls for all to see.

[xiii]Ibid. 

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