The Annunciation, 2022, oil on linen, 61 x 50”Marc Dennis has created a delicious little oil painting of a tart capped with glistening red cherries which shine sweetly in a pool of succulent syrup carefully spooned over custard cream, contained in perfect golden pastry, neatly baked in a dainty and reflective aluminum foil cup. Wayne Thiebaud would be proud to paint such a tasty treat. The lucky collector who bought the painting told Dennis that this was the most talked about canvas in his collection, despite being only eight inches square. At first, people admired it as a tantalizing temptation, and as a cheerful reminder of the sensual pleasures of pies, pastries and sugary desserts. They recalled amiable experiences of eating with friends, of past meetings with family, colored with a touch of nostalgia. Then, they saw the hair clinging to the stickiness, and suddenly sentimental pleasure wheeled to gross repulsion and the questions started—if you were served this in a café, would you call the waiter for a new pie? Would you eat it anyway? Whose hair was it?
That single hair is a perfect point of entry to understanding Dennis’ paintings. He loves painting beautiful things but he wants them to be more than simple objects for admiration. “I’ve always wanted to find the subversive side of beauty,” he says. “Beauty to me is a series of experiences, not just a painting, not just an image, not just a sunset but our perception of that sunset, or who we’re with during that sunset, or who we’re with during that time of looking at the painting, or who we’re with when we get a dessert and it looks so great and then you see there’s a hair in it. What do you do? I don’t know if painting can be about anything. I think painting is just an experience. I can never predict what anyone is going to experience. I’ve always loved that saying, ‘beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.’ We can all agree that the sunset’s beautiful, the sunrise, the ocean or icicles glimmering in the moonlight, but there are certain aspects of beauty that I want to subvert…I want to give them a twist.” His images usually conceal a cheeky piece of visual trickery, an additional layer of meaning to interest the viewer.
Sweet Cherry Tart with Hair, 2023, oil on linen, 8 x 8”During the last year of the pandemic, Dennis noticed that people communicated through social media with brief comments, quickly made and quickly forgotten, and he decided that he needed to give them a more permanent place in cultural memory. He realized that the comments were similar to the little messages once left on Post-it notes, and created huge collages of them on his studio wall. He titled the first of his paintings to document the collected notes, The Joy of Painting, (gleefully referring to popular favorite Bob Ross’ television show) including the Post-its among a trompe-l’oeil jumble of visual ephemera—scraps of paper with delicate studies of beautiful eyes, postcards of full, lush flowers, pictures cut from magazines, cartoons and a banana duct-taped to the wall in reference to Maurizio Cattelan’s dada gag at Art Basel Miami Beach. Dennis copied comments from his social media accounts onto the Post-its and scattered them liberally among the spread—choosing them for glib irony and amusement. “This is like decoding a detective’s crazy wall,” said one, “You should title this Silver Platter with a Lobster,” suggested another.
The Joy of Painting, 2021, oil on linen, 48 x 60”
Wicked, 2022, oil on linen, 48 x 36”In the top left corner of The Joy of Painting there is a clipping of the French neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ beautiful but gently melancholy Portrait of Princess Albert de Broglie. She is delicately soft and pink in her blue silk dress. Before Covid, Dennis made regular visits to The Met to visit the painted princess, and even found himself talking to her. During the pandemic, and missing his visits to the masterpiece, Dennis created another composition using his studio wall as a backdrop, titling the new piece From a Close Distance.This time he executed a perfect copy of the Ingres, and included trompe-l’oeil copies of sketches, reference pictures and paint scrapings in the finished piece. He included an inverted photorealistic copy of one of Robert Indiana’s famous “LOVE” logo postcards to dispel any questions challenging his feelings toward the painting. From a Close Distance was purchased by the Norton Museum of Art in Florida, where it now hangs just outside the Old Masters Gallery, providing an elegant bridge between the conceptual “contemporary” art of the 20th-century and the superior technical quality of the older collection.
Fly Away, 2023, oil on linen, 39 x 60”
Dennis was born and raised in Boston. One of his favorite museums is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which was infamously burgled in 1990 by thieves who used box cutters to cut the paintings from their frames. The theft and the empty frames that were abandoned—and still hang empty on the gallery walls—made a powerful impact on him. “I began to think what kind of sound it made. I began to think about the violation of paintings. I learned about the guy who punched the Monet painting. Violating art began to interest me. I began to think about the Sex Pistols. Everything seemed to be so violent, but controlled. I thought, ‘how can I express this?’ It has to do with my personal life, with Covid, with politics—everything is being torn.” He gave his son and his friend box cutters and asked them to slash some canvases, watching how they cut them, and photographing the tears. “I realized that the backs of the canvases came through because they flapped over like an open wound. It just hit me. It was sad but fascinating.” People saw digital pictures of Dennis’ photoreal paintings of slashed florals online and thought they were seeing evidence of actual vandalism, and were upset and angry. “They have had a huge impact on the viewers,” Dennis says.
From a Close Distance, 2021, oil on linen, 56 x 60”
Recently Dennis has become preoccupied by other ideas about collections, of how things relate to each other when gathered together. The Post-it notes of the Covid paintings made ample use of the narrative relationships between juxtaposed objects—every object has its own story to tell, but as soon as it is placed beside another object, that story is changed by the relationship between the one and the other. Dennis’ Post-it paintings reminded him of displays of pinned insects in glass cases he had seen at the American Museum of Natural History. But the clutter reminded him of other, darker things, too, recalling the macabre imagery of the goods collected by the Nazis at the death camps. “My cousins were murdered at Birkenau,” he says, “Photographs of rings and shoes, and gold teeth, and spectacles and eye glasses have never left my collective memory. All these rings and items tell stories. Here they are, inanimate, in piles. Piles, collections, insect specimens. They intrigued me. The Post-it paintings intrigued me and they pushed me into thinking about all of these things.” He began painting huge canvases of piles of rings and bangles, and has included among the jewelry a watch which was given to his father by his grandfather. They are enormously oversized, which gives them an eerie abstract presence. At the same time, he has started working on a series of small paintings of museum interiors—a different kind of collection. Fascinated by the violation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, he deletes a painting from each of the rooms. As well as these images of collections, his examination of his ancestry has compelled him to make a series of paintings about Jewish identity. “My ideas come to me like snowfall,” he says. A snowfall with a hair. —
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Michael Pearce is a dynamic writer, curator and critic. He is an active and enthusiastic participant in the conversation about 21st-century art and its roots, especially contemporary imaginative realism. He has published dozens of articles about art and artists, and is author of Art in the Age of Emergence. He is a champion of art that emerges from popular culture and shapes the spirit of the age. He is Professor of Art at California Lutheran University.
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