In 2018 Content produced his first self-portrait: a symbolic portrait, nearly a caricature of himself as a painter who does away with rules and expectations, not only in relation to painting but also regarding his self-imposed ban on representation. For years that restriction was the point of departure for his abstract work. But gradually this had changed. The world had become a richer place, Content discovered, and he wanted to give expression to the countless images he envisaged. Furthermore, he believed that an artist need not limit himself to a single style. With the exhibition a mensch, on view at Galerie Onrust from 24 August to 28 September, Content shows the outcome of these surprising developments and ideas in a series of portraits and figures.
The title a mensch does not stand for the outwardly appealing individual, shaved and wearing white sport shoes, the type that Content runs into on his way to the studio. Content has, after all, never been interested in visible reality. Here the term a mensch refers not only to a person of integrity but also to a man as he actually is, stripped of that thin layer of civilization. In his portraits he therefore works in an extremely direct manner, taking inspiration from Art Brut and the work of Dubuffet and from the ‘graffiti faces’ photographed by Brassaï in the streets of Paris – drawings, a mix of language and marks, that had been applied directly to the wall in a plain way, with a knife or simply with chalk.
Content creates his own versions. He smears and models the paint, heightens gazes with beads and pieces of glass, and sets his tubes of paint around this as a frame, as though wanting to prove that these apparitions have been built with paint. Ceci n’est pas un portrait. Content’s portraits give rise to associations with masks, primitive cave drawings and icons, but mainly confront us with the range of forces and repressed impulses and emotions that coexist in each of us. Man with all of his shortcomings and scars incurred throughout life. For that reason this series is warm and sorrowful, upbeat and abrasive, amazingly engaging and terrifying at the same time
The same can be said about the large, graphic figures that refer to early man, to Adam and Eve, but also to the viewer and to the nakedness of existence that ties us all together. Like some of the portraits, they are framed by stones. These bring to mind the fragments of creation which, according to the Kabbalah, was broken apart. But they also make up a fierce, menacing aureole which reinforces man’s indominitable primal strength. With a mensch Content shows us portraits of people whom we’ve never seen, but who still look curiously familiar to us.
