March 1 - March 26, 2021

Press release

Flesh Poems takes its name from an essay by art historian Suzannah Biernoff on the life and work of artist and educator, Henry Tonks (1862 – 1937). Today Tonks is perhaps best known for his surgical drawings of WW1 soldiers whose faces underwent reconstructive surgery by one of the progenitors of modern-day plastic surgery, Harold Gillies. Tonks was himself a surgeon and longstanding teacher of drawing and anatomy at London’s Slade School of Art, where he taught amongst others painters such as Paul Nash and Gwen John.

Tonks’ surgical pastels, often depicting before and after renderings of Gillies’ operations, possess qualities of intimacy and horror, abjection and the irreducible materiality of flesh, skin and bone. These works stand not in art museums or galleries but in medical and surgical archives. As such their status as cultural artifacts remain open, porous, open to hermeneutic doubt and ambivalence. Their current resting place is then a frame of sorts, one that is internal and external to Tonks’ portraits.

In her essay Biernoff notes that Tonks referred to his pastels as fragments of the human. It should be clear that these are indeed literal fragments of war-torn faces. We could acknowledge torn psyches and bodies, irrevocably impacted by a carnage beyond words - here in these mute spaces Tonks’ poems find resonance. They are, in such wordlessness, provoking the invention of language or at least some kind of semiotic that might grasp hold of something approaching meaning. These fragments, held within blasted faces and folded reconstructions, are potentially an opening chapter for an abstraction that enters consciousness through disfiguration. 

In a recent catalogue essay for MoCA’s  Pattern & Decoration survey exhibition, LAXART curator Hamza Walker playfully inverts Clement Greenberg’s notion of homeless figuration, a term used by Greenberg for an emergent abstraction containing floating fragments of representation. Walker observes a homelessness rooted in the kind of work championed by Greenberg, and poses a question as to the cost of such insularity both then and now. 

These faces bearing human brutality and tenderness are, in their very dislocation and disfiguration, a home of sorts - a focus on limits and boundaries as a means to regenerate meaning and value. Tonks was known for his privileging of the haptic as an art educator, his touch is just one of the many latent places where an ethics of abstraction could take root, face to face.

—David Edward. February 26th, 2021