“It’s half a tennis match, and half a play,” said José Lerma of “European Mixed Masters,” his show on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York through June 14. The painting-based installation has some interesting resonances with Mika Rottenberg’s exhibition at Rosen’s main space across the street: namely, a restlessly inventive desire to pull together disparate themes and moments in time. For Lerma, the genesis of these works involves both the French Revolution and changes wrought by sporting technology within the professional tennis community in the 1980s.
On a superficial level, “European Mixed Masters” is a tableaux of colorful paintings: A massive airbrush-on-canvas depiction of a crowd, along with four mixed media-on-reflective-Mylar pieces that depict the sillhouttes of tennis stars Steffi Graff, John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, and Martina Navratilova, rendered with thick outlines that recall the promiscuous smears of Jonathan Lasker. The crowd painting is derived from Pietro Antonio Martini’s engraving “Exposition au Salon du Louvre en 1787” — Lerma has appropriated many of the personages from the original, adding extra eyes and noses here and there, and inserting a handful of his own acquaintances in with the group. In Lerma’s version, the mob of faces is akin to a crowd in a theater’s orchestra pit — and also a group of spectators watching the abstract tennis match taking place among the other four paintings. (In pre-Revolutionary France, Lerma noted, many indoor tennis courts used by the aristocracy were converted to theaters.) There are other referential touchstones — a 1790 play, “Critique de la Tragédie de Charles IX,” that was part of an ongoing dust-up among intellectuals of the time — but for the most part it’s clear that “European Mixed Masters” has less to do with historical fact, and more to do with the delight Lerma takes in toying with that raw material. “The story is in the service of the paintings,” he said. “You don’t have to know any of this stuff. But if you want to go into it and find out, it gets more perverse.”
The paintings’ color palette reflects the clash of cultures and eras that inspired them, Lerma explained. “The underpainting [on the Mylar works] is pastels, the kinds of colors you would’ve had in the ancient regime,” he said. “On top are the colors of late ’80s sports gear.” The airbrushed painting of the crowd deliberately nods to satirists like Hogarth and James Gillray, he said, with overlaid washes of pigment that reflect the hand-tinted political prints that acted as “the ‘Daily Show’ of their time.” (The rendering style, which resembles a line drawing with ballpoint pen, is what Lerma terms his “bureaucratic aesthetic — something you could make at a desk, but it’s gone incredibly out of scale.”)
Personal background is equally as important to understanding the installation. Lerma himself used to be a tennis aficionado, but said he lost interest once the “natural touch” of McEnroe was subsumed by the “power-based” attack of people like Lendl. The artist is a history buff (and, before beginning to pursue art at the age of 27, he was studying to be a lawyer). After years of slogging through critical and theoretical texts, he finally followed his own gut and made work about what he loved. “I would read a biography any day, and look at history documentaries constantly. I was like, ‘Why am I pushing against that?’” he said. “I found a lot of information and aesthetics that were unexplored. It seemed much richer to me. And the research was a delight, the most enjoyable thing in the world.”
If this all sounds a bit heavy and dense, it’s not. Lerma describes the exhibition as “exuberant,” and delights in the vibrant colors and super-thick paint consistency on the Mylar works (the result of mixing acrylics with silicon and caulks). “Kids will love it,” he said. “It really is a great, infantile vehicle for introducing fucked up ideas.”
