Marlene Dumas: Open-End

Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 27 March 2022 - 8 January 2023

Marlene Dumas' paintings lead down a dark road to a sea of troubles, as one couple, already experiencing their fair share of problems, discover on a visit to the current retrospective, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. 

Mark is immediately struck by the skillful brushstrokes of one of the paintings, The Gate, and he gets up close to it. His eye swims amidst the diluted blues and reds around the buttocks, and rests where the paint coagulates into little bumps and mounds around the genitals and inner thighs. Connie watches her boyfriend.

He turns around. 'It looks like you,' he says. Connie's face drops. 

'So I'm a pair of spread legs? You're an arsehole.' 

Mark tries to apologise, but Connie is already walking away. He looks once more at the painting, then follows Connie into the next room.

'I'm sorry,' he says. 'I thought it was quite a beautiful painting at first, but I guess it's pretty objectifying. I get it now.' 

'It's fine, just be careful. These paintings are about sensitive things.'

They realise they are standing in front of a large painting of a young man looking down at his own purple, erect penis.

'That's you', says Connie. 'Like all men, obsessed with your own gratification and nothing else.' 

'He looks like one of the bathers in that Seurat painting.'

'He's the history of art staring back at its own long, phallic imagination.'

Mark isn't listening; he's too pleased with himself for having got the reference. They move on to the next painting - 

'That's The Girl with a Pearl Earring!' Mark exclaims, delighted. He really is on form today.

'Yes, painted to look naked and vulnerable. Dumas is drawing our attention to the darker side of art, to the trauma in these women's lives, their marginalisation, their fear.'

But she's lost him. Mark is off, admiring the skill with which Dumas modulates the purplish shade on one side of the face of a tearful woman; how the light peeps in with the grain of the canvas; how the dark, succinct outlines and the white highlights recall, above all, the paintings of Manet; how sensitively the ink captures the contours of the faces in the taxonomic mugshots.

This is extremely frustrating for Connie. 

'You're missing the point,' she says. 'This show is not some joyride. These are troubling images, they address their fraught history. And the present. They're difficult.'

'But if they're not meant to be enjoyed, why are they painted so seductively?'

They go on like this, to and fro, until neither can be bothered to talk to the other about the show any more. Not wanting to admit they've fallen out, they walk together, looking at painting after painting in silence. Connie has the suspicion that she and Mark might not be suited for each other. Her friends say that Mark isn't right for her, too, but maybe they're jealous . . . ? 

Can Connie and Mark be reconciled?