Tom and Sue: Harlan Levey Projects,Brussels, BE
Past exhibition
Sad Young Man on a Train, 1992-2002/2022
Oil on canvas
Variable
Sad Young Man on a Train consists of 107 oil paintings, painted by TR Ericsson between 1992 and 2002. Though each painting was made at a different time and under...
Sad Young Man on a Train consists of 107 oil paintings, painted by TR Ericsson between 1992 and 2002. Though each painting was made at a different time and under different circumstances, the hundred plus paintings are now to be considered as a single work of art, which will potentially be broken up again. For the then young artist, the end of the 20th century was a turbulent decade full of movement, experimentation and anxiety. In 2002, Ericsson turned 30 and stopped painting. His mother died the following year. The loss changed the course of his life and practice. These paintings were stored away in the attic of his summer home in Painesville, Ohio, unseen and rarely thought of until the summer of 2021 when for the first time they were all hung together. What emerged was a kind of self-portrait and time capsule; a youth on the move, inspired, questioning, forging an identity. The early paintings are modestly scaled and explore a variety of styles and subject matter; portraits, figures, landscapes and still life, here and there an abstraction. Many were painted over or cut from larger works. Some were worked over laboriously. Others were made in a single sitting. Old Masters, American Modernists and more conceptual painters such as artists Luc Tuymans and Gerhard Richter are all evident influences. In this period, Ericsson worked exclusively either from life and direct observation or from photographs found in his mother’s photo albums. Impossible to know then and extremely evident now, these set the foundations for his epic mixed-media project “Crackle & Drag,” which he has been expanding on since 2003.
The title of the work, Sad Young Man on a Train, is taken from Marcel Duchamp’s 1911-12 painting which he identified as a self-portrait. The painting was shown in the 1913 Armory Show in New York and was the only painting by Duchamp that did not sell there. It was later bought by the artist Manierre Dawson, thought to be the creator of the earliest abstract paintings in American art. In 1914, Dawson established a fruit farm in Michigan and continued his practice while working long hours in his orchards. He kept the painting until the 1940s, at which time he sold it to Peggy Guggenheim. It remains on view to this day in her collection in Venice. Later in his life, Duchamp incorporated a photographic reproduction of this early painting into his now famous box in a valise, asserting the importance of earlier works and their continuity with what followed. The painting is a cubistic one, which depicts a fragmented figure in motion on a moving train. Time, though seemingly rigid, appears malleable and abstracted: the young man, a self in motion on a train in motion. For Ericsson the many potent metaphors and conceptual games in Duchamp's painting become personalized and contemporary, recognizing how an older artist may look back with clarity, sympathy, and even gratitude for the energy it took to make the inward and existential motions required to grapple with the external forces that had surrounded his youth. As time trips over itself, the gesture of gathering these early works all together again is much more than a merely matured acknowledgment of how the past weaves into the present in unexpected ways. It accounts for the complexity of a sum when each part has its own value and has its own meaning. Meaning, which changes over time.
In considering Ericsson’s decision to re-contextualize these older works, it’s perhaps worth noting that he completed his reading of Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu just prior to his reexamination of the paintings. It’s also worth noting that twenty years earlier, in his self-published magazine THIRST (a precursor to Crackle & Drag) he quoted the French author. At that time, he confesses, he struggled to get past the first few pages of the seven-volume masterpiece. Yet in retrospect, this quote sets the stage for liberating these paintings from their youthful struggles.
“Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.
The title of the work, Sad Young Man on a Train, is taken from Marcel Duchamp’s 1911-12 painting which he identified as a self-portrait. The painting was shown in the 1913 Armory Show in New York and was the only painting by Duchamp that did not sell there. It was later bought by the artist Manierre Dawson, thought to be the creator of the earliest abstract paintings in American art. In 1914, Dawson established a fruit farm in Michigan and continued his practice while working long hours in his orchards. He kept the painting until the 1940s, at which time he sold it to Peggy Guggenheim. It remains on view to this day in her collection in Venice. Later in his life, Duchamp incorporated a photographic reproduction of this early painting into his now famous box in a valise, asserting the importance of earlier works and their continuity with what followed. The painting is a cubistic one, which depicts a fragmented figure in motion on a moving train. Time, though seemingly rigid, appears malleable and abstracted: the young man, a self in motion on a train in motion. For Ericsson the many potent metaphors and conceptual games in Duchamp's painting become personalized and contemporary, recognizing how an older artist may look back with clarity, sympathy, and even gratitude for the energy it took to make the inward and existential motions required to grapple with the external forces that had surrounded his youth. As time trips over itself, the gesture of gathering these early works all together again is much more than a merely matured acknowledgment of how the past weaves into the present in unexpected ways. It accounts for the complexity of a sum when each part has its own value and has its own meaning. Meaning, which changes over time.
In considering Ericsson’s decision to re-contextualize these older works, it’s perhaps worth noting that he completed his reading of Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu just prior to his reexamination of the paintings. It’s also worth noting that twenty years earlier, in his self-published magazine THIRST (a precursor to Crackle & Drag) he quoted the French author. At that time, he confesses, he struggled to get past the first few pages of the seven-volume masterpiece. Yet in retrospect, this quote sets the stage for liberating these paintings from their youthful struggles.
“Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.
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