Second Life: James Welling at Regen Projects
The subject of James Welling’s Portrait of an Augustan Girl (2022) appears lost in melancholy introspection. She faces the viewer, but her emerald eyes look off to the side and slightly downward. Alarmingly, her nose is smashed and eroded, and a sizable crater occupies the center of her chin, yet without a trace of blood. Furthering the mystery, a round, pinkish form vaguely resembling a nautilus shell sits on her forehead. These strange attributes make sense when one realizes this is not a portrait of a person, but of an ancient Roman statue.
Each of the pieces in Welling’s show “Iconographia,” recently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, originated from a photo of an artifact—usually the face of a statue—that the artist either shot at a museum or appropriated from a plate in a book. He then manipulated the source images in Photoshop, inserting eyes from old paintings, borrowing necks and chests from other sources, and applying saturated colors to skin and hair. After laser-printing each digital composite onto a plastic lithography plate, Welling dampened the image with water and rolled on a thin glaze of dark ink, toning down the synthetic palette and uniting the disparate blocks of color. The pictures were further tweaked with touches of oil paint and sandy substances, while undesired patches of ink or paint were removed using toothpaste. Imperfections such as stains and creases formed during these final stages, giving the images a more natural look, and conferring a painterly, weathered tactility akin to that of the depicted statuary.
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Art in America website. Read more about James Welling.
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