By Devin Ratheal
This summer, I exhibited Peel of the Real, a series of oil paintings on wood and canvas at IA&A at Hillyer Gallery in Washington, D.C. The works feature distortions and distorted fragments of European religious paintings, works that appear both familiar and alien, dripping and undulating. The paintings explore how inherited cultural images, especially religious ones, resonate with autobiographical, cultural, political, and ecological themes.
I grew up in West Texas in a secular family, never having been to church or even giving much thought to Christianity. When I encountered religious European paintings, I found them strangely magnetic, both alien and familiar, leaving me with an uneasy feeling. As a descendant of Europeans, I felt I was supposed to recognize them but the worldview they expressed and emerged from seemed so distant that when I encountered them, I was struck by the sense of distance between myself and them. Drawn to spaces within my consciousness that lacked definition, I became deeply existential as a young adult. Consequently, and to my utter surprise, I found something akin to the worldview embedded in those alien paintings arising in me to frame a world that my materialist worldview could not produce.
Involuntary Memory is the name I’ve given to the body of work to which the paintings presented at Hillyer belong. This term, borrowed from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, used to describe a moment in which the protagonist recalls, in vivid detail a childhood memory provoked, unbidden, by a sense experience. I bend the term to refer to something like ancestral memory, inherited and alive in the body, or lurking in the collective unconscious, that may arise in an individual’s experience. These paintings imagine this inherited worldview as something bubbling up in the psyche of the descendants of Europeans in this country, an intense and unresolved negotiation with mystery.
In these works, I hoped to combine moments of recognition of the original works or traditions they come from with unrecognizable forms and figures that threaten to, and in some cases, overwhelm the image. I see these works as registers of deeper, seismic disturbances: violent destabilization of identity disconnected from being, identity that cannot admit difference. My paintings attempt to expose how the descendants of Europeans struggle to find new expressions for the memory embedded in inherited images. By reworking these images, I aim not to resolve the crisis but to give form to its pressure, to mark the seizures of the collective unconscious where identity, history, and otherness collide.
I believe we need to recognize the nonhuman around and in us, and to reconfigure our representations of ourselves. In these paintings I seek to engage representations of the human in European Christian art as containers of a mode of relating to the nonhuman that is not working. I believe in productive uncertainty, in resisting settling into recognition and naming, in making space for experiencing how uninterrogated memories and habits of perception obscure the nonhuman that is both undeniably present and paradoxically so hard for us to see.
Around the time I began working with images of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, I was exposed to the work of Aby Warburg, the Jewish German cultural theorist of the late 19th and early 20th century, whose framework provided a way of understanding the alien power I perceived in the images. For Warburg, all culture is founded in the orienting of human society to the nonhuman world. The earliest form of this orienting is ritual, the rehearsed and repeated engagement with an agency, spirit, etc. Critical to ritual is representation; I must have a frame for what I want to contact. The long history of visual culture is one aspect of this “framing” of the world that habituates us to a mode of relating to ourselves and the world. Warburg theorized that the enduring power of representations persist such that they take on a life of their own, migrating across time and space, absorbing changes as they go while maintaining their function. Warburg traced the journeys of these “migrants” (images of deities, figures in expressive forms, styles and symbols, etc.) across vast swaths of geographic and temporal time, revealing a profound interconnectedness of even far-flung cultures. In all of human visual culture, Warburg saw a tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian, the enlivening and the pacifying, that was renegotiated anew in the creation of every artefact. Warburg perceived that changes in culture, style, form, etc., did not necessarily lead to progress, and that one could read in artefacts the oscillation between the poles of superstition and rationality, between reactivity and reflection. Chaos is always just beyond the door, under the picture plane, contained within a concept. Representations always grapple with the immediacy of the potential overwhelm, striving to carve a Cosmos from the Chaos.
Religious European art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods crystallizes a primeval negotiation with nonhuman otherness, one that arrives on the heels of the reintroduction of antique forms from Greece and Rome. Artists wrestled with extracting the expressive power of these pagan forms while fitting them into Christian frameworks—a tension Warburg identified as central to this period. As Renaissance humanism and emerging rationalist ideals emphasized human agency and divine reason, these works increasingly centered the human figure as the ultimate vessel for the sacred. In the Christian narrative, this culminates in God’s becoming human, positioned as offering the ultimate sacrifice, supposedly absolving humanity once and for all. This representational resolution closes off the ongoing, dynamic negotiation with nonhuman forces that earlier traditions maintained through ritual, replacing uncertainty and reciprocity with certainty and control. My work seeks to crack open that crystallized resolution, to make the suppressed alienness visible, to give it space to breathe, wriggle, and drip.
Given that I am moved by what I sense in the paintings I reference, I approach the making of work in a very open-ended way. I have collected hundreds of images of paintings, sculptures, reliquaries, and artefacts from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. When beginning a new work, I am guided by my synesthesia, intuition, and emotion more than any attempt to narrow in on a specific concept. I explore various digital distortions of the images, creating multiple overlapping layers that I then erase through. Sometimes I combine multiple works and/or utilize the silhouettes of reliquaries as containers for the forms. Other times I identify energetic images in the references and decide on a shape that way. I may work on multiple references at a time, following the threads of different feelings until there is an “aha” moment, when I register in my body that the work is resonating with what I was intuiting. Intuition guides the creation of the works, but I also have a sense of what works are about, usually. Sometimes I feel I know what a work is about before a reference is finished while at other times, I may not know what a work is about until months after the painting has been completed.
The movement from screen to panel enacts a further transformation, one in which the past is not reproduced but broken open to reveal unfamiliar energies. Some areas of the painting will remain faithful to the reference I created, while much of the image, because it tends to be quite distorted, is approached with more energetic brushstrokes in the early layers. I’m intentionally loose in those areas because the paint contributes a great deal. Forms, from the abstract to the geometric and figurative, appear in the brushstrokes in the more unrefined areas and I work to develop them and to discover their relationship to the whole. This part of the painting process opens to the nonhuman directly, both in the materiality of the paint generating unexpected impressions and in my trying to discover what the painting “wants to be”. Approaching the paintings in this way, I feel more like a collaborator and excavator, and less like an author. I feel my process allows the works to open themselves up to other dimensions of interpretation, resonating with the originals, but undeniably unstable and mutated, interrupting one’s orientation instead of solidifying it.
Just as the painting process invites me to wait and look to try to make sense of form and meaning, I hope the work invites a similarly productive uncertainty in the viewer. I intend that the experience for the viewer is less about the materiality of the paint than the experience of perceptible forms and figures that don’t lead to an “aha” moment, but rather remain in a space of discovery and searching without settling in certainty. The hope is that the audience resonates with the experience of formulating perception, itself a balance between memory and sense experience.
Edgar Wind, writing about a core concern for Warburg, describes the “pregnant moment” in which the tensions embodied in a work of art threaten to destroy its form, a moment of crisis where opposing forces press against the artwork’s boundaries, demanding resolution yet resisting it. This sense of impending rupture animates my practice. The inherited images I work with carry their own internal pressures: the weight of historical memory, the suppressed energies of their pagan origins, the violence embedded in their colonial legacy. As I manipulate and repaint them, these tensions intensify rather than resolve. The dripping, undulating forms that emerge seem always on the verge of collapse, yet they persist, holding their precarious shape just long enough to be seen and felt. They exist in that pregnant moment Wind describes—neither fully formed nor completely dissolved, suspended between recognition and alienation.
The works in Peel of the Real examine different manifestations of the same fundamental crisis: the inability to recognize our interdependence with otherness, whether that otherness takes the form of the nonhuman natural world or of other people. Both forms of blindness stem from inherited representational schemes that position the European-descended self as separate from and superior to what it perceives as external threats to its coherence. Amidst a flood of representations that do not reinforce the superficial framework of white Christian-ness, the chaotic forces within them are unleashed and oriented toward the “other.” The impulse within this representational scheme to sustain itself is so strong it seeks a familiar apocalypse in order to avoid a present in which identity is unmoored.
Debt in Raptures takes Rubens’s The Tiger Hunt as its starting point, amplifying the chaos, distress, and violence in the original and further undermines Renaissance confidence in human mastery over nature. In this work I obscure the visibility of human figures, leaving disembodied limbs and parts of faces embedded in what has become a tumultuous soup of forms, some fluorescently colored and beautiful. The heads of the horse and tiger remain in full, with their expressions of terror and violence; the only beings in the images available for viewers to identify with. I want viewers to engage the work without being given a human figure to orient how they should navigate the chaos. Feeling with the horse, feeling about the tiger, evokes intensity that is not easily rationalized away.
I hope the experience of engaging the work is one of being lost in a chaos that never settles itself, of finding beauty and the grotesque bound up together. The work resonates with our inability to recognize ourselves as embedded within the material, nonhuman world—as part of the flows of energy, the cycles of plants and animals, the geological processes that constitute what we call “environment.” This representational failure contributes directly to the unfolding climate crisis, in which we remain unable to see ourselves as participants rather than observers. The inability to perceive ourselves as an aspect of the world leads to chaos, a state of affairs demanding we learn to identify with what appears to us as chaos—the uncontrollable, responsive, more-than-human world that our rationalist frameworks cannot relate to.
Hineni fuses Caravaggio’s The Sacrifice of Isaac with Maestro de Palanquinos’s Fall of the Rebel Angels, creating a hybrid image of authority and violence. Abraham’s head rises from a box, knife raised, set atop an ornate base (a silhouette taken from a late 17th century French golden candelabrum) embodying the rise of authoritarianism in the form of white Christian nationalism and resonating with Israel’s ongoing warfare in Palestine. The title, Hebrew for “here I am”—Abraham’s response when called to sacrifice his son—resonates with a blind willingness to follow authority regardless of consequences. The work addresses the inability of those at the top of existing power structures to perceive their own existential predicament—their inability to step outside the representational “box” that defines their identity in opposition to otherness. The fear inherent to rigid representational frames, if it does not lead to an opening in the direction of uncertainty and vulnerability which reveals interconnection, will seek to perpetuate its rigidity with ever more violence and restrictiveness, attempting to force the world to fit the internalized schema. The extravagant base serves as a metaphor for extracted wealth, atop which the worldview of whiteness balances itself, occupied by those most willing to harm and exclude. Because change is inevitable and the structure has ossified, those at the top look outward for the next sacrifice, the outlets and causes that justify the toppling of stability in pursuit of “the other.”
European Substrate highlights figures rather than obscures them. In distorting Rubens’s triptych, The Elevation of the Cross, this painting engages what Warburg called the pathosformel—the formulaic expression of intense emotion that migrates across artistic traditions. The figure of Christ here is inverted; rather than the classical gesture of mercy being raised skyward toward divine intervention, it is lowered into the subconscious, about to be subsumed by the earth. There is an alignment of salvation with the nonhuman material agency undulating throughout the painting, but the work also resonates with the fear of descendants of Europeans about the loss of whiteness. Jesus is exceptionally white in the piece in contrast with the other bodies, echoing the sense of whiteness being lowered in the hierarchy of representation in the culture. This lowering resonates also with the attack on the message of love and care central to Jesus’s teachings. Paradoxically, the fear of losing a white Jesus becomes the justification for disregarding his teachings, refusing to accept difference, motivated instead by the vilification and removal of bodies deemed not white. The call to empathy that should interrupt the cycle of violence is suppressed, driven underground by representational schemes that cannot admit the humanity of the other.
Whiteness operates as what I see as the quintessential example of a representational scheme that exists primarily through negation—defining itself not by what it is, but by what it excludes and dominates. This is an inherently unstable position, one that requires constant reinforcement through the subjugation of others. Christian nationalism represents the intensity of a human being that cannot reflect itself back to itself, that instead of allowing its worldview to transform through encounter with difference, attempts with ever greater force to control how others are represented and understood.
The dualistic foundations of the Christian worldview—the separation of body from soul, Earth from spirit—persists in the scientific materialism that ostensibly replaced religious frameworks. Both worldviews frame the world as fundamentally separate from human consciousness: either as a fallen realm to be transcended or as a mechanical system to be controlled. This disconnection from the Earth’s agency has led to both ecological and cultural devastation, as we continue to imagine ourselves as observers of rather than participants in the more-than-human world.
Scientific materialism, like the religious framework it displaced, suppresses recognition of the Earth’s presence and our embeddedness within it. Yet the need for felt connection persists, erupting in the gaps where our representational schemes fail to account for the complexity of our actual experience. Until we develop ways of seeing that allow us to recognize ourselves as expressions of, rather than exceptions to, earthly processes, the internal imbalance will manifest as external destruction—the elimination of ecosystems, cultures, and ways of life that our narrow representational frameworks cannot accommodate. Too often, this unresolved memory curdles into destructive impulses, the drive to make the world into an image of hell, so that it may at least be recognized.
Peel of the Real was an attempt to peel away the familiar surface of inherited images and to engage the unsettled forces within them. These works inhabit the tension Warburg describes between survival and destruction, between recognition and alienness. They invite viewers to experience the images not as relics of a past world, but as active forces still shaping how we see, remember, and imagine.
The work explores how descendants of Europeans can engage with inherited memory without collapsing into nostalgia or repetition, and without disavowing it entirely. How do we allow space for the otherness embedded in these images, as well as in our everyday lives, to speak again? How do we confront the violence carried in them without perpetuating it? My aim is not to replace old answers with new ones, but to engage aspects of our perception and modes of meaning-making that hold the potential for discovering and staying with the unknown.