The painting that lent its title to the exhibition is equally mysterious and ambiguous. The first thing we see in The Hunted is a monkey sitting on a low table in front of a forest landscape. Upon closer inspection we perceive a giant moth lying on the table next to the monkey – and recognise that the apparent forest is just one of those ‘photo-wallpapers’, popular in the 1970s but luckily extinct today. The seemingly straightforward title leaves open the question of who is being ‘hunted’ here. The monkey might have been chasing the moth, but could just as well be a hunted and stuffed sample of his species. Furthermore, both animals can personify evil. Since the Middle Ages, the monkey has been a symbol of both the fallen angel and the defeated devil – of, that is, the demonic as such. The moth cannot but remind us of the poster for ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ – to this day one of the best movies dealing with the phenomenon of evil. In The Hunted, the animals and the scenery surrounding them are incongruous in an irritating way. The African baboon does not fit the Scandinavian birch forest, nor does the oversized moth fit the small table. In his painting Dada is Dead (2009), Ghenie sends a wolf straying through the rooms of Berlin’s legendary Dada Salon. He loves presenting the viewer with such surprising constellations – a kind of surrealist greeting from afar! As often, The Hunted, too, contains an autobiographical element: Ghenie remembers these photo-wallpapers from his youth in Communist Romania. Back then, they were popular status symbols, because they had to be acquired from abroad.

In Boogeyman, the largest painting in the series, evil does seem to take on human form after all. The term itself refers to a creature or thing that causes someone irrational fear (“…or the boogeyman will get you!”). The seated figure in the painting, however – the painter himself – does not show any signs of fear. Instead, he seems to be listening to the dark visitor, his gaze focused on the chaos of shapes and colours in the studio’s background. In the mysterious figure’s roughly scraped facial features, we recognise Pan, the mythological half-man, half-animal. In ancient times the symbol of music and revelry, in Christianity he came to acquire a negative meaning. Horned and cloven-hoofed, he became the visual inspiration for the devil. In “Dr. Faustus”, Thomas Mann lets composer Leverkühn sign a deal with the devil: 24 years of inspiration and creativity – in exchange for renouncing love. Surely, the dream of never-ending creative power is something that a 21st-century artist, too, might give some thought. It may be coincidence that Mann’s composer Leverkühn is called Adrian. In any case, the title Boogeyman is certainly ironic.

Two small portraits fit seamlessly into the Visitation series. In The Moth, the large insect from The Hunted has landed on Stalin’s forehead. Ghenie’s fascination with Eastern European dictators has already produced a series of studies of Lenin, as well as the series The Trial, which deals with the last hours in the lives of the toppled Romanian ruler Ceausescu and his wife. The exhumation of Ceausescu’s body and the publication of images of his remains earlier this year inspired Ghenie to paint Study for the Boogeyman. But the dictator did not make it into the larger painting.

Self-Portrait No. 2 is only the second time that the artist has made himself the subject of a portrait, although this painting is more of a virtuoso colour-study of his neck and jaw. Like in the other two self-portraits and the depictions of the dictators, the anatomical details that constitute a face – eyes, nose, mouth – are mostly blurred and painted over, while the lateral features are depicted in a naturalistic and plastic manner. As a portraitist, Ghenie is a painter of heads, not faces – and the difference between the two matters: “For the face is a structured, spatial organisation that conceals the head, whereas the head is dependent upon the body, even if it is the point of the body, its culmination.” (Gilles Deleuze). Like Francis Bacon before him, Ghenie dismantles the face in order to discover the head that lies beneath.

The most recent painting in the exhibition, The Stigmata, is not part of the Visitation series, but it gives us a taste of the next group of works that Ghenie will be turning to. The composition is based on photographs of nuclear weapons tests conducted by the US military in the Nevada desert in 1951. Although nuclear ‘mushroom clouds’ appear in Ghenie’s paintings already in 2006, his interest does not lie with the explosions or their aftermath. The task he has set for himself is rather to depict the dryness and ruggedness as they appear in the landscapes of the early Renaissance-masters Piero della Francesca and Antonella da Messina. Ghenie is fascinated by the abstractness and modernity of these painted rock formations. In the right foreground of The Stigmata he has included the rock that dominates Jan van Eyck’s masterpiece Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (1438). But the choice of title for this landscape study is more than just an art-historical reference. The Greek word ‘stigma’ can also be translated as a ‘burn mark’ – and what does the explosion of a nuclear bomb inflict on a landscape if not an enormous burn mark? It bears mentioning that The Stigmata and the related study Nougat (the codename of a nuclear test) are the most light-filled paintings that Ghenie has ever painted. They might well be a turning point. [JJ]