Andy Denzler's Hybrid Souls - Article by Donald Kuspit

Andy Denzler, Hybrid Souls I, 2024, Oil on canvas, 210 x 180 cm | 82.7 x 70.9 in
 

Andy Denzler

Hybrid Souls

Opera Gallery New York

20 March - 12 April 2025

By DONALD KUSPIT March 28, 2025

Dialectically reconciling painting—sometimes ruthlessly, not to say recklessly painterly, as in Study for Shuttered Figures II, 2025—and photography, Andy Denzler overcomes the antagonism between them that has existed since the painter Paul Delaroche, on first seeing a photograph in 1840, declared “From today, painting is dead!”.  A few years later, Charles Baudelaire argued that photography “has done not a little in strengthening plain stupidity in its belief that art is nothing other and can be nothing other than the exact reproduction of nature… A vengeful God has heeded the voices of the crowd”.  A “natural alliance will grow up between photography and the crowd”, bringing with it “a loathing for history and the divine art of painting”. “If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether (…) let it be the secretary and clerk of whoever needs an absolute factual exactitude in his profession (…). But if it be allowed to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man’s soul, then it will be so much the worse for us!”.  For Baudelaire, photography was emblematic—symptomatic—of “the great industrial madness of our times”1— an industrial madness that has climaxed in artificial intelligence. Denzler’s starting point is photography, often his own, found photographs, and AI-generated prompts, that is, AI-generated images.  The AI Art Magazine, a 176page biannual publication which came out in December 2024 “focuses entirely on AI-generated art. It celebrates the fusion of human creativity and intelligent machines, a transformative moment in art history”. Is the painterly aspect of Denzler’s works regressive, the photographic aspect progressive, or, as I want to suggest, his works make the distinction passé, for the marriage of both modes afford a new sensation of the new, a fresh aesthetic frisson.

Andy Denzler, Hybrid Souls II, 2025, Oil on canvas, 210 x 180 cm | 82.7 x 70.9 in

Denzler’s art does the same thing, painting emblematic of human creativity, photographs and AI generated images machine made, but he unites them for a romantic purpose, romanticism “situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling”, Baudelaire wrote.  “It is characterized by intimacy, spirituality, color, and an aspiration towards the infinite”.  It is the feeling that is communicated by the faces and figures—some bizarrely, wildly intense, some more pensive and sober—in Denzler’s works that makes them convincing. Surveying the range of Denzler’s ‘Distorted Paintings’ and ‘Collision Paintings’, I came to realize that the “key” to all of them—including the morbidly expressionist, grotesquely distorted figures in Study for Shuttered Figures II, 2025—are the five realistic Study Portraits of a Woman (Homage to Ferdinand Hodler). Hodler (1853-1918) was a major Swiss painter, as Denzler is.  Both are symbolists, concerned with conveying the psychological truth through physical forms, above all the body and face.  While a number of Denzer’s works are radically expressionist, not to say manically gestural— Hybrid Souls II is exemplary—most of them are unequivocally representational, profoundly realistic—empathically descriptive. Hodler’s works, particularly his portraits, like Denzler’s portraits—there are many of them—as distinct from his aggressively distorted, emotionally grotesque, expressionistic figures, are representations of ego, rather than raw enraged instinct. They are pensive and introspective rather than aggressively—manically—expressive, as in the Hybrid Souls works. It may be strange to say so, but Denzler’s five Homage to Ferdinand Hodler works have an emotional affinity with Hodler’s portraits of his mistress on her sick bed.  The faces in Denzler’s portraits are as emotionally disturbed as the faces in Hodler’s portraits. Denzler and Hodler are both exquisitely sensitive to the inner life of women, and with that respectful of their being. One might say they are feminist paintings, that is, they treat woman as an autonomous being. All of Denzler’s many portraits of woman do; they are not the voyeuristic products of the so-called male gaze. I also suggest, perhaps all too speculatively, that the repetitiveness of Denzler’s figures is indebted to Hodler’s “parallelism”, which involves the repetitive use of figures to make an existential point—death in Eurythmy, 1895. It is noteworthy that virtually all of Denzler’s works— with the exception of the Man With Black Scarf—depict women, whether as all desirable body or all soulful face, suggesting that, like the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, Denzler believes in the natural superiority of woman. WM