Sometimes in the company of powerful artworks, new thoughts come into being like a time-lapse of a mushroom pushing through dead leaves. For reasons I don’t pretend to understand, St. Lucy, looking radiant astride her buck-tooth steed, dislodged the formulation that we become moral beings at the moment we believe the world is not as it should be. And our “religion,” organized or otherwise, is whatever we do to bring the world we desire into being.
A standard moral equation goes something like: If not for X (insert choice villain), the world would be more Y (insert choice utopia). A more compelling moral equation might be: There are two types of people in the world: those who divide the world into two types of people and those who don’t.
In pictures produced in the medieval period, the good guys have halos and the bad guys have horns, lest you be confused as to whose side you’re on. But in this gallery full of dragons and mythical creatures, John Gardner’s novel “Grendel” (1971) springs to mind. In a retelling of the Old English epic poem “Beowulf,” composed, according to some scholars, sometime around 750 CE and told from the point of view of the sympathetic dragon, Grendel scrambles the moral deck and complicates our loyalties.
Medieval paintings commonly represent various orthodox virtues through clear depictions of saints and villains to tell an allegorical story that likely would have been familiar to its audience. In other words, they probably already knew the ending. Sebastian Thomas appropriates the form of a morality tale while undermining its clarity, perhaps suggesting that this story of minting martyrs and villains is a played-out violence factory, nostalgic though we may be for manufactured certainties.
But what would heroism look like without a villain? There’s a reason our political discourse is cast as a morality tale rather than a utilitarian consideration of policy. There’s a reason the third-person omniscients among us want to be “on the right side of history.” It seems to be the only plot motivating enough to put down the remote.
For my part, I am squarely on the side of getting out of the inflationary and inflammatory martyrdom economy on all sides of the political spectrum. It would be disappointing to learn that each of the characters in Thomas’ cast is an avatar of some particular person or virtue, say, a Marxist allegory of postcolonialism. I read his work more like a soft parody of moral clarity.
At the same time, it is impossible not to read each work like a graphic novel. And so I leave you with a purely subjective interpretation of one of my favorites in the exhibition, “The Consolation.”
In this piece, a blindfolded captive is held at arrow point by three, maybe four, ambivalent bounty hunters in shining armor amidst competing architectural referents. One executioner stands on the foot of another, who holds one hand of the captive and washes his feet with the other. They all lean toward the robed captive with a plaintive posture as if pleading for forgiveness. Another knight places his hand on the heart of the captive and removes his helmet for a more human connection, maybe to express his condolences, or promise to care for his family, or to claim he wouldn’t be doing this if not for the tyrannical monarch he works for. But the captive is inconsolable, his blindfolded gaze directed at the ground. There is neither forgiveness nor condemnation in his posture, only calm resignation.
Who is the victim? The martyr? The perpetrator? Maybe Thomas invites us to write a new story and edit out the scapegoats. Maybe we are being cajoled to give up the greatest conspiracy of all, the one that can confidently locate good and evil in another person. Then again maybe that’s just my story.
“Sebastian Thomas: Painter’s Pantheon” is on view at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, 325 West Huron, through December 20.
