Michael Torlen: Dance Me to the End
Paper Moon (from Dancers). 2011, monoprint with oil and water-based inks, woodcut, linocut, stencil, and hand-coloring on BFK paper
February 10 - April 9, 2022
About The Show
With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, we invite you to join us in a ponder of the great and interconnected mysteries of love, sex, and death via Portland artist and cancer survivor Michael Torlen’s Dance Me to the End. This exhibition of paintings and monoprints was selected from two of the artist’s complementary series: The Dancers and Memento Mori.
In his artist statement, Torlen notes: For this work, I am thinking about themes of life, love, and death, and W. B. Yeats, who said, ‘Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind. And indeed, many a serious mind (the ancient Greeks, Freud, Marcuse, Bataille, Lacan, Foucault, and more) has written at length about the complex and mystifying relationship between sex and death, Eros and Thanatos…la petite mort.
Torlen’s Memento Mori series is a unique and intensely personal addition to the art historical genre of the same name which translates to “remember you must die”; With a vivid palette borrowed from the coded coloring of chemo drugs, and imagery inspired by biotech diagnostics, the classic elements of the genre (skulls, skeletons, etc.) take on a contemporary, almost futuristic feel. The subject matter of these fascinating paintings is intimate and autobiographical, documenting the physical and emotional anguish and uncertainty of a potentially fatal diagnosis, yet the imagery is graphic and lively.
The Dancers series of monoprints tell another, less primal story, putting the focus on love, romance, and the glamour of New York City in a bygone era. Perhaps celebrating the transformative and enduring power of love and human connection.
The monotypes’ titles are taken from classic songs, and the title of the exhibition is excerpted from Leonard Cohen’s achingly gorgeous, Dance Me to the End of Love.
The message of this exhibition is one of exuberance and celebration, even in the face of death. Although based upon the artist’s personal experiences, the exhibition themes are universal, expressing the eternal human condition: love and loss, joy and sadness, beginnings and endings. In remembering we must die, let us live to the fullest and Dance to the end -- seize the day, and squeeze from it every joy that we can grasp. And especially that greatest joy of human existence: Love.
