Landscape Becoming Portrait

The installation of David Frenkel’s exhibition evokes display modes used in museums of natural history. Like them, Frenkel’s works present the animal world in a highly artificial and theatrical fashion. His strategy points at instances of grotesque domestication, only to further radicalize them, mock and expose his own submission to the taxonomic human urge to signify, catalogue, and name everything there is: to find shapes in clouds, to turn landscapes into portraits of ourselves. Frenkel’s ironic gaze at cultivated nature defies the narrative presenting man as the most noble and intelligent creature on the face of the earth. Frenkel regards the role of the artist as akin to that of the satirical clown who reenacts human conduct as a theater of the self; he is the fool, or the madman, who walks the street and screams out his theories. The exhibition transpires between worlds of seduction and morbidity, science and exoticism, academy and popular culture. Perhaps the clown tells a story that is more true to life than the story told by the educated scholar.