Tom and Sue: Harlan Levey Projects,Brussels, BE

Tom and Sue: An exhibition by TR Ericsson

TR Ericsson began his career as a conventional portrait painter and has never really stopped making portraits, though for many years he traded painting for mixed-media works in unconventional materials such as the work Bride (an image of his mother’s first wedding), which is made of nicotine and currently on view at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Portraiture is central to his third exhibition at Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels, two of which are durational and inform each other the way a mother does a son and vice versa: One is of Sue and another of Tom. One, shows a young woman aging, the other expresses a young man searching for his voice. Both are created over the course of decades. Art historically, a portrait was usually of an isolated individual, a likeness executed with varying degrees of skill or accuracy, often, though not exclusively, of the upper classes. With photography, and more than ever our current smartphones and selfie obsession, the portrait is democratized and digitized. Today, recording a likeness is a rather mundane affair. In response to this, many artists now often exclude likeness altogether in favor of revealing a deeper and more penetrating interior identity, which Ericsson does with remarkable success.

 The portrait of Sue consists of a 7 Volume Letter Book called ALL MY LOVE ALWAYS NO MATTER WHAT, which illustrates every written or taped record of Susan Robinson’s voice. The portrait of Tom is called ‘SAD YOUNG MAN ON A TRAIN’ and consists of 107 paintings created between 1992 – 2002 just prior to Sue’s death. When combined, they produce an overarching portrait of filial love, grief, joy and existential crisis. Unlike individual portraits the double portrait conveys a relationship between the depicted subjects. A relationship less static than the isolated individual and in this togetherness a literal third presence emerges, it is a zone of constantly shifting thought and emotion where the border lines between the two individuals become indistinct, porous, it’s impossible to determine who each of them may be without the other. As a further complexity many other individuals and even the culture at large influences and agitates the narrative. Here we have a mother and son. Tom and Sue. Two self-portraits conjoined, that neither Sue or Tom knew they were making at the time. Sue was writing letters to Tom throughout the 90’s and up until her death in 2003. Tom spent those years away from home studying painting in New York City, at first making a rigorous attempt at academic figurative realism and later experimenting with modern and contemporary approaches to painting.

Both the letters and paintings reveal the personalities and mental and emotional movements of mother and son, having never been brought together before in a single space in time the meaning and expression they will conjure together remains unknown.

The exhibition features other types of portraits, such as Ericsson’s film Crackle & Drag, where an attempt to portray a mother becomes a portrait of a son, Angel of the Morning, Ericsson’s first painting in 20 years and the mixed-media work Tom & Sue which maps all the chaos of reading another person through love.