Evan Penny, *HANGING* *MARSYAS* (detail), 2022, silicone, resin, hair, 46 x 7 x 8 inches.
Courtesy of the Artist, Blouin Division Gallery and TrépanierBaer Gallery. Photo: Darren Rigo.

When I walked into Blouin Division last fall during gallery weekend, I said hi to Laura and Tyler, looked to my right, and saw Jesus. Approaching him (he hung from the ceiling), I looked down, noticed the hooves and the horns, noticed the figure’s roped wrists, noticed the tail, his general bestiality. This was not Jesus; it was Evan Penny’s HANGING MARSYAS (2022). I read the exhibition title: Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror. In the myth of Marsyas, the satyr’s hubris gets the best of him. He challenges Apollo to a musical contest and, predictably, loses. The god of reason does the reasonable thing and flays Marsyas. There are several renditions of this flaying, chief among them Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1570s).

Evan Penny, *HOMAGE TO HOLBEIN*, 2016. Pigmented silicone, hair, resin, polychromed wood, 12 x 169 x 6 inches.
Courtesy of the Artist, Blouin Division Gallery and TrépanierBaer Gallery. Photo: Darren Rigo.

The painting shows Apollo, kneeling on one knee, his back hunched, his expression curious, invested, appreciative as he skins an upside-down Marsyas with such care that it looks like he’s painting him. His posture and expression make it seem like he’s admiring Marsyas’s body. Other depictions rarely show this tenderness. Iterations by Agnolo Bronzino, Antonio Corradini, Luca Giordano, and Charles André van Loo are relatively violent, with a crueler Apollo. In Titian’s rendering, Marsyas’s arms hang below his head, his wrists roped together, his expression panicked, but his body resigned. In his Evan Penny: Ask Your Body catalogue essay, Alexander Nagel frames Titian’s scene as a counter-crucifixion: god sacrificing animal, rather than animal sacrificing god. Nagel’s essay title, “Why Do You Peel Me from Myself?” comes from a question Marsyas asks as he’s being flayed in Ovid’s account of the scene in the Metamorphoses.

This seems a fitting story to capture the interest of a figurative sculptor: Apollo’s skinning of and attention to his victim (subject) is mired in sculptural analogy. The degradation of Marsyas's body—removed from the reverence, the posture, the pedestalization, the completeness, the gravity, the dignity associated with sculptural renderings of the body—allows experimental negotiation with these traditional terms. In his courage and insolence, Marsyas is a figure of avant-gardist fervor.

Further, the casting process Penny used to make Hanging Torso (2017), another piece in Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror, required him to hang the work-in-progress to remove the rubber mold, revealing the finished sculpture. This materially reenacts flaying. Penny’s Torso appropriates the Rosso antico torso of a centaur (first–second century CE) now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The centaur torso is an ashy, rotting, red ochre, almost as if this torso, too, has been skinned. On the other hand, Penny’s Torso is encased in a blanched, parchment-like skin, not yet flayed. Hanging from a chain, like a chrysalis, the piece is suspended mid-metamorphosis between fragmented statuary artifact and fleshy body, quartered, with hair and blemish. This centaur torso hangs upside down, like Titian’s chimeric Marsyas.

*MARSYAS AND THE VENETIAN MIRROR*, 2024, installation view, Blouin Division Gallery.
Courtesy of the Artist, Blouin Division Gallery and TrépanierBaer Gallery. Photo: Darren Rigo.

Also at Blouin, Penny’s Self-Portrait after Gericault’s Fragments Anatomiques (2017) sits in the middle of the lofty space. To model this piece, Penny used drawings of Théodore Géricault’s anatomical studies (1818–19), body parts from the morgue Géricault painted in preparation for his Raft of the Medusa (1818). The severed limbs and the torso, spread over the gallery space, revitalize the story of Marcantonio Bragadin, who, while overseeing the Venetian client Kingdom of Cyprus in 1571, was flayed and quartered by the Ottomans and whose tale inspired Titian’s version of Marsyas’s torture. In a similar tortuous vein, Penny modeled the three resin figures of Murray Cluster: After Tintoretto’s “Miracle of the Slave” (2013) after Murray McKay, the celebrated Torontonian life model. In the precedent that Penny references, Jacopo Tintoretto—who was briefly Titian’s apprentice—illustrates the interrupted mutilation of an enslaved person who had traveled to Venice, against his enslaver’s orders, to pay homage to the relics of Saint Mark the Evangelist. Among other gruesome punishments, the enslaver orders the enslaved person’s dismemberment, but St. Mark interferes. In Tintoretto’s painting, St. Mark’s spirit flies from above to render the execution tools powerless as a passive figure lies on the ground. With the situational context removed, Penny’s figures are both the saint flying from above and victim on the ground. This narrative trope of embodied punishment with conditional reprieve carries patristic and eschatological cadence.

It wouldn’t be surprising, then, to learn that some pieces in Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror were previously exhibited from May to November 2017 in Venice at the Church of San Samuele in a show titled Ask Your Body. Michael Short uncovered the story of Marcantonio Bragadin in preparation for Penny’s show. Short also learned that Titian worked on his painting in his studio near San Samuele. The history of Penny’s show (and its different iterations) buzzes with appropriations and referential significance—proximal, visual, narrative, and methodological.

To my relief, Jesus does make an appearance in Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror at Blouin (and in San Samuele, of course). Penny’s HOMAGE TO HOLBEIN (2016) appropriates the imagery of Hans Holbein’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–22) in a relief sculpture distended over four meters in a further nod to Holbein’s stretched, skewed skull at the bottom of The Ambassadors (1533). When I first encountered Penny’s anamorphic Christ in a wooden box, with fingers and wisps of hair exceeding the frame, I did not understand what I was seeing. I reencountered this disbelief when looking at documentation of Penny’s L. Faux: CMYK (2005) and Panagiota: Conversation #1 and #2 (2008), but with these pieces, my disbelief continues. In L. Faux: CMYK, Penny simulates, in sculpture, features of optical photography and printing like CMYK layer misalignments and bleeds; ordinarily, these indicate shifting plates, the disruption of a single registered edge for the image. The Panagiota pieces are portraits of artist Panagiota Dimos based on time-based pictures Penny took at thirty-second intervals as he and Dimos conversed, a technique Penny developed in collaboration with photographer Michael Awad. The result is a panoramic smear with riffle stripes. Dimos, her conversation, and her movements register in the conditions of a (sound) wave.

Evan Penny, *HOMAGE TO HOLBEIN* (detail), 2016. Pigmented silicone, hair, resin, polychromed wood, 12 x 169 x 6 inches.
Courtesy of the Artist, Blouin Division Gallery and TrépanierBaer Gallery. Photo: Darren Rigo.

When I speak of my disbelief here, I don’t mean it as a commendation of Penny’s technical facility, which is undoubtedly commendable; what I mean is that it is extremely difficult to understand or imagine these digitally endemic modes of manipulation applied in sculpture from two-dimensional documentation of the work. The instinct is to comfortably translate a flat document of a sculpture adopting two-dimensional features as a two-dimensional piece—precisely because I have often practiced seeing these alterations in the second dimension. Maybe this is the point; here, the receptive experience of the artwork resists recapitulation in modes of mechanical reproduction. Penny separates the tics and signature effects of one medium (photography and post-development manipulation) and enters them into the latitude of another medium (sculpture). This separation, too, is an act of flaying—of conventional decisions from medium exclusivity and of polite fidelity from acts of homage.

While L. Faux: CMYK and Panagiota appropriate the features of one medium in another, HOMAGE TO HOLBEIN appropriates both medium-based methods and historical visual referents. Penny reiterates a popular image (an image of Christ at least, even if you don’t know the Holbein) but adds the signature of digital stretching to it. Our experience of Penny’s relief sculpture is incongruent with our recollection of this image, and so we are necessarily redirected to reckon with the discrepancy between the image we internalized and Penny’s iteration. In this case, appropriation works to recirculate a recognizable image, modified to index contemporary issues like photographic transformation and concerns about artificial intelligence in collaboration with artistic motive.

Exhibited only at Blouin Division thus far, the sculpted series AI PROMPT and RESPONSE (2024) features mirrors with classical frames formally vegetative and visceral. Sprawled over the frames are contorted theriomorphic figures whose pain and transformative (shapeshifting) potential are glorified in a pious order. Penny entered prompts like “Evan Penny,” “Sculpture,” “The Flaying of Marsyas,” and “The Venetian Mirror” into an image-generating AI , and the photograph series AI PROMPT: EVAN PENNY SCULPTURE / FLAYING OF MARSYAS / VENETIAN MIRROR (2024), also exhibited at Blouin Division, includes some of these images. The figures’ torsion multiplies in the reflection, and our cosmopolitan voyeurism fleets over the mirrors. The figures look both free and entombed, independent of the frame but also of the frame.

The oneness between material and figure or body is significant, and it is a gesture that Penny repeats, more intimately, in his series GILDED BODY FORM (2023–24). These body-based pieces are impressions of Penny’s palm pressure and creases on the material. Although they might be perceived as abstract rather than figurative, works in this series are more precise in their translation of body form to sculpture. Penny’s more overtly figurative work, by contrast, is principally concerned with capturing illusory representations of how humans perceive the figure. In his figurative work, Penny indexes the intermediary (and sometimes, digitally aided) common perception that filters and directs his sculptural choices. On the other hand, there is no intermediary between body and material in his body forms. This impulse to abstract the body stamp from its figurative context persists in Penny’s Lattice (1991) at Blouin, which also records creases of Penny’s skin (elbow, arm, palm) in beeswax intaglio on wood panel. Starting from the body, the marks retain both minute and vast reference, reminiscent of sheared cells, leaf veins under a microscope, and geological-cartographic moments. Penny’s FROM MEMORY (1993) series accomplishes a similar ambiguating of referential range, but in etched brass

Other pieces in Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror, like THE FLAYING OF MARSYAS (2023) and UNTITLED (2024) series of photographs, explore modes of stretching, warping, and diffractive kaleidoscopic effects. In both, Marsyas seems to be taking selfies in a multifaceted mirror. Applying modern and contemporary tools of the “digital Zeitgeist” to ancient figures like Marsyas and Christ pushes forth a poignant, comical absurdity. The temporal contrast between the subject matter and the methodological reference brings into relief, with renewed verve, concerns regarding photorealism for figurative sculptors as well as those over digital manipulation, artificial collaboration, etc. This is a wonderfully effective use of appropriation: here is this piece (Holbein’s Dead Christ) that had a particular, largely religious significance in the sixth century, and here is a reiteration with revision. See how the appropriated work tracks a contemporary ethos.

I wonder if this comical current was as potent in San Samuele. A depiction of Christ is rather expected there, and the Holbein’s sixteenth-century patristic tenor comes through without command for contemporary complementarity. In the church, Penny’s subject matter, then, might have overshadowed a serious questioning of the concurrent manipulation, so much so that visitors to the church, rather than questioning this taffied (son of) God, might have prayed to it. The transmission of Penny’s appropriative efforts not only relies on temporal distance from the precedent but is site-dependent, too. In the Church of San Samuele in Venice, I can’t help but think that Penny’s HOMAGE TO HOLBEIN becomes an homage to Christ—integrated into devotional imperative more than it is in a contemporary art gallery, where retrospection on the artist’s oeuvre and his precedents innervates the exhibit and contemplation about the difference between “body-based” and “figurative” work is in relief. Here, tortuous figures receive a promenade, not a prayer, and we can callously speak of the mortal hubris that reproduces divine endeavor, a hubris whose consequence is a myth touchstone, then a Titian, then a show at Blouin Division, where you can say hi to Tyler and Laura, look to your right, and see Marsyas.

Taffying God in Sculpture

“The rubric I presented—Can I climb this work?— is clear. But now I worry about the logical progression of that question: Should I climb it?”

Taffying God in Sculpture

“The rubric I presented—Can I climb this work?— is clear. But now I worry about the logical progression of that question: Should I climb it?”

Cityscape