Alexei Mansour, “Becoming a Vessel”
September 7—October 7, 2023
It is said that, nearly every day, the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes would leave the clay wine jar where he slept to publicly masturbate in the Athenian agora. “If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly,” he remarked to his scandalized neighbors. Diogenes was a pre-Christian ascetic, but one who—in contrast to the chaste monks who followed him centuries later—insisted on the self-sufficiency of human pleasure. All our worldly mores and desires, he argued, are subservient to our bodily needs. The radicalism of this position feels only heightened by the last couple millennia of sexual repression, a history that wore heavily on Alexei Mansour when he was growing up and coming out while attending Eastern Orthodox Church services. It should come as no surprise that there weren’t a lot of ways to be queer in a religion that condemns homosexuality as sin. Ancient Greek and Roman mythology, however, frames desire as fundamental to humans and the gods who created them. For Mansour, it recuperated the latent spirituality in eroticism.
Mansour was recently graduated from the Tyler School of Art when he began to really immerse himself in collage as a method to develop his work. Greco-Roman iconography, homoerotic images, and religious symbolism were recurrent themes. As these works were slowly overtaken with marks in various media, such as crayon, colored pencil, gouache, acrylic, and oil paint, they retained their collage-like quality, so that the figures in them seem to hover above, and intermingle with, one another. Their forms are immediately recognizable from classical sources, like Greek sculpture or vase painting: a Discus Thrower, for instance, or a Satyr Uncontained. Dionysus, the god of vegetation, festivity, religious ecstasy, and wine appears here too, drunkenly flicking the dregs of his drinking cup (Kylix) as he reclines on a symposium lounger.
Known variously as Bacchus, Dionysus was also sometimes referred to by the Greeks as “the god from the East.” He was believed to be of foreign origin—something with which Mansour, of Lebanese and Syrian descent, says he identified—as if the Greeks were simultaneously drawn to, and repelled by, his unbridled nature. The god had another pseudonym, Dionysus Eleutherios (‘the liberator’) as his wine, music, and ecstatic dance emancipated his followers from fear and worldly cares, undermining the suppressive constraints of those in power. There are many satyrs, disciples of Dionysus, in Mansour’s work. You can spot one emerging wet from a monumental vase in Night Activities, from which he observes two young male athletes who appear to be either wrestling or fornicating: an ambiguous scene which turns us into parallel voyeurs.
The brightly colored, collage-like flatness of Mansour’s work was also inspired, he says, by the Byzantine art he saw in churches growing up: archetypal depictions of the environments, patterns, and figures whose presence as icons disembodied from earthly terrain, constitute strange distortions of painterly perspective. Each stands on their own even as they comprise part of a whole, a quality corresponding with the phrase “Disjecta Membra” (Latin for ‘scattered fragments”), coined by the Roman poet Horace to describe parts of a poem or fragments of ancient Greek pottery that when disassembled and rearranged would still be recognizable.
“The way the paint is handled and the way that the space is constructed is supposed to make it feel otherworldly,” Mansour explains. “I've always been interested in that sense of otherness, the abstraction of it.” Queers, too, feel abstracted from a world around them that alienates them for being different. Following Jacques Derrida, the many doublings in Mansour’s paintings affirm the sense of difference within them—even more potently when the source of that difference is same-sex desire. Mansour sanctifies that difference as the very thing that makes gods of men.
Flatness and doubling also recalls the early paintings of Thomas Lawson, whose vibrant canvases in the early 1980s heralded a return to the art historical canon—including classical imagery—through a layering of pastiche references. For the postmodernists, Greco-Roman cues served less as allegory and more as atmosphere. And the most atmospheric aspects of Mansour’s paintings only reinforce this effect: the many diaphanous leaves and flowers in them seem to situate us in a terrestrial dream-space where everything is emerging from unstable ground. Mansour himself describes this as a “heterotopia,” borrowing a term from Michel Foucault—a space that is both between, and contingent upon, all others. “The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center,” Foucault wrote. “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world.” It’s a site where the Dionysian wildness of our desire rules, and one where the vessel of the body can be ecstatically filled. The garden doubles as a space of otherness and holds space for otherness, a safe space to explore oneself—and to become a vessel.
—by Evan Moffitt