CURA.

Suppose I were to begin as if the world was about to cease to exist for us. The air becomes thicker, and smoky almost, with soft pink brushstrokes controlling the volume of dark paint. The flames lick your feet as you lean over me, kneeling in the pool of a tangerine-orange wax. Our bodies press against each other. Their contours dissolve, though not without resistance. “Resurrection,” wrote Jean-Luc Nancy, “is the uprising (surrection), the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other, and of the disappearing in the body itself and as the body.”^[1] We disappear in bodies and as bodies, morphing into animated flesh.

Flesh, as opposed to body and figure, is not a prisoner of the narrative. Rather, it’s a sensation of coming undone, of being chewed around the edges. It means existing for a brief second beyond the everyday versions of self. A paradox of sorts given that our ancestors became more human and achieved a meditative state through the act of staring into fire. As turquoise flicks of heat give way to white and yellow smoke in the background, I am reminded of the etymological root of the word flaming (Latin flamma)—to shine, flash, burn, to break out in violence of passion, to exist in bright or gaudy colors, but also of its derogatory use from the 1970s describing queer excess. Monsters, two decapitated minotaurs, are lurking in the background, but we remain oblivious to their gaze. We are flaming. You burn me.

 Ambera Wellmann’s paintings eschew narrative. Instead, they embody time and chaos, performing the labor of excess in multiple temporalities. Something affects us intimately as we observe her daunting compositions, and yet the meaning remains elusive. “I embrace time, I avoid narrative,” Ambera declares one afternoon in late January after we visit the new display of European Painting at The Met. There, the narrative and figuration bloom in full abundance testifying to the interdependence of power, wealth, storytelling, and knowledge production. Slowly, we take in the intoxicating archive of eroticized violence: decapitated men, crucified Christs, apocalyptic battle scenes, and myths of femininity offered by the patriarchal culture. They are all here: the bloodthirsty Medusas, the devout virgins, the mad women in the attic, the melancholic femme fatales. The European painting tradition, just as literary history, shows all too clearly the dark fascinations of Baroque, Romantic, Verist, or Surrealist artists who endow monstrous attributes and romantic misery upon their muses and models. Fascination, fear, and disgust of a woman constructed as the Other are among the narcotic feelings that the European painting tradition finds hard to resist. Monsters too haunt the Western canon, reminding us how in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, the discourse of monstrosity was frequently deployed to dehumanize specific communities. The non-normative and the deviant were the personification of a dangerous, irrational world that simultaneously frightened and captivated the minds of pious Europeans. In that case, I feel lucky enough to see my desires mirrored in the work of an artist like Wellmann rather than, let’s say, Rubens. But similarly to Ambera, I am not overly interested in illustrative narration. Instead, I wonder what can be learned from the monstrous body politics and monstrous plasticity where excess and hybridity allow us to reimagine time and space.^[2] Reflecting on the endless experiential temporalities in painting, Ambera Wellmann draws my attention to the medium’s capacity to interrupt the patterns of spectatorship and to accommodate various forms of time: from its historical modality where time “sews its threads to the loose ends of the past so that the past might become present to containing indexical time, which envelops images and physical events over an elapsed period and condenses them in such a unified but complex surface.”^[3] Wellmann’s works contain a promise of blurring the lines between past, present, and future. Think of them as time aberrations that haunt our perception of reality and space. “Painting doesn’t freeze time. It circulates and recycles time like a wheel that turns,” wrote Marlene Dumas, a painter who, like Wellmann, recognizes the recursivity of un-becoming that painting as a medium propels.^[4] In her work, Wellmann explores the recursive character of the erotic in which the outcome of an erotic process feeds into the unraveling of a subsequent lapse of desire. There is no linear beginning and end, just a whirlwind of lust, terror, and care that consumes queer subjects of her paintings as they renegotiate their plasticity and spiral in different directions. Expectedly, there’s a lot of movement involved. The matter reinvents itself from the inside. Bodies open and enclose one another. Alternatively, they teeter on the brink of disintegration producing a haunting sense of loss and dislocation. It is so perhaps, because the un-becoming portrayed by Wellmann allows for the possibility of change and transformation, but dissolves boundaries of selfhood. I wonder if these are conditions for obtaining ecstasy and non-normative self-actualization in time and space. McKenzie Wark puts it nicely: “a way to be temporarily erased from the world, but in order to come back to it and endure it.”^[5]

Consider the painting You Burn Me (2022), summoned in the introduction, exemplary of these messy distortions. Residual traces and warped forms emerge against a smudged background with scratches, swirls, and brushstrokes occasionally making their appearance. These fleshy gestures become specters where time manifests itself. Wellmann speaks of them as follows:

The idea of erasure as the final gesture in the process of un-becoming is crucial as it harnesses a state within the work that is pre-pictorial,^[7] as Deleuze would say—the non-visible in the painting. According to Wellmann, it allows one to distinguish between time and narrative, through gesture as opposed to image, and erasure as opposed to the application of paint, where the gesture becomes an active and negating agent that transforms the work and the viewers’ experience.^[8] When thinking about Ambera’s work, I like to think of this endeavor as monstrous plasticity—the time of minotaurs.

Though emancipatory temporalities and queer utopias are usually conceptualized through their orientation towards the future, Wellmann explores a speculative engagement not only with futurity but also with the past, reimagined for its potentiality for pleasure and excess. By engaging with art historical references, she modulates them according to her desires. It might be tempting to casually name-drop Bruegel, Bosch, or Ingres when discussing Wellmann’s playfulness around Old-Masters tropes, but Wellmann does not limit herself to reinterpretation of cultural codes of Otherness and monstrosity. At stake here is something way beyond the feminist and queer rewriting of the dehumanizing canon. Of equal importance is how the artist configures the ruptures in time embedded in the material body of the painting and how she harnesses the bodies of her protagonists to allegorize time, chaos and confusion. Owing to the use of formal tools, the abovementioned indexes and time warps, she destabilizes the binary version of history limited only to victims and oppressors, humans and monsters, nature and culture. Rather than confining herself to the declarative aspects of representing transformation through mimesis or allegory, the painter relates to this content through the imperfections, cracks, and efforts to break free from matter. If we consider the tricky relationship between memory, fantasy, and potentiality through the figure of a carcass, the so-called minotaurs that populate many of Wellmann’s recent paintings, we might just as well see the specters of flesh.

Could these monstrous shells offer new imaginaries for identification and desire? Could the tensions between carcass and flesh help us rethink temporal registers of fantasy of performative remains of distant and not-too-distant queer past? Rebecca Schneider, philosopher and performance studies scholar may be instructive here. Writing about performative remains, she observes how in the traditional understanding of history, the archive is bone (that which remains) to performance’s flesh (that which slips away): “In the archive, flesh is given to be that which slips away. Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh. Flesh is blindspot.”^[9] Furthermore, she wonders whether we could think of flesh as a place of residue in a nexus of body-to-body-transmission. Considered this way, performance according to Schneider could be understood not as “that which disappears (as the archive expects), but as both the act of remaining and a means of re-appearance and ‘reparticipation’.”^[10] What I have always found fascinating about Wellmann’s practice is how she interweaves the personal and the collective in the process of creating a speculative archive of the queer re-appearance and reparticipation. Composed from a deeply personal point of corporeal engagement with the medium of painting, her works negotiate a tender line between intimacy and sociality, between negation and affirmation.

Alongside the chaos, something celebratory and joyous peeks out from behind the darker corners. Power and domination subvert themselves recognizing the need for interdependency of subjects, forms, and pictorial planes. I am drawn to the unexpected alliances that Wellmann makes between colors to achieve depth and the surprising vitality of these entanglements. Consider what those emerald and mossy greens bring to the dazzling splash of yellow in her depiction of the blooming fire in You Burn Me. A similar effect of viscerality, time distortion and affective surplus, the painter conjures through the application of the darker hues in the folds of the body: behind elbows and knees, armpits, on the outer edges of pink flesh. The way Wellmann handles individual body parts in her paintings is notably carnal and disorienting, while the face, the ultimate location of individuation, is almost always depersonalized, with simply a sketch of characteristics.

In the work titled Counterclockwise (2022), an almost erotic loop between the bone that remembers and flesh that slips away becomes particularly apparent. Expectedly, care and violence are also at play here. Set against the dark backdrop of the muddy ground, a yellow flower, perhaps a daylily, a marigold or a buttercup, attempts to break through the soil. I like to think of it as a wildflower. Already in bloom, the flower is crushed from above by a hybrid constellation of bones, a minotaur. In Greek mythology, the Minotaur represents the bestial, animal side of man that must be conquered. He is born of a cross-species mating and is confined deep within the labyrinth on the island of Crete so that his monstrous shape and behavior do not exert harm onto others. Wellmann treats the minotaurean figure very loosely, never alluding literally to the half-man half-bull depiction that we know from mythology, but ascribing to him the symbol of disobedience that goes against the figure of law and normativity. After all, minotaurs, like wildflowers are creatures of trespassing. Their vitality and excess can be seen as a form of acting-out, as a desire to live a messy life outside of governance. As a dear friend and a disobedient botanist once told me, wildflowers are against narrative, they die on their own time. The flower in Wellmann’s painting goes against time in the most counterclockwise of fashions, as if blooming in full in the Hadean underground. This image of resilience reminds me of a short story by the Brothers Grimm called The Willful Child, with which philosopher Sara Ahmed begins her book about troublemakers and fugitive modes of being.^[11] The willful child is a young girl who expresses her willfulness through unique actions, such as “her arms outstretched.” She disobeys the “chain of command” (God, doctors, and the child’s mother), in other words, the coercive authority that cannot alter her deeds. The child’s willfulness can only be suppressed through death, but even in the final moments, “her outstretched arm” continues to rise like a flower from the dead and is eventually suppressed by her mother with a rod. In Wellmann’s paintings, we observe, through her willful subjects, flesh in action as a symbol of dissent that goes against the normative systems. A tender beast, an unruly child, a flower that bends time and interrupts the logic of command and obedience.