Robert Longo rose to preeminence in the ‘80s with his charcoal drawings “Men in the Cities,” where he photographed friends like Cindy Sherman and Larry Gagosian who were wearing a suit and had to strike awkward poses as he threw objects at them. He had been inspired by a scene in The American Soldier, a 1970s film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, where a gangster seems to be dancing as he is shot. Longo’s subsequent large black and white drawings of suited figures in ambiguous, contorted stop-motion action came to represent young urbanites of the period fighting larger forces.“Luminous Discontent,” the latest exhibition of large scale charcoal drawings by American artist just opened at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s Marais gallery in Paris.Spanning three floors, it includes a new body of work based on X-rays of paintings by Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, and Rembrandt. “Believing in God is believing in the invisible, and I thought X-rays were seeing the invisible,” Longo says.Listen to the artist talk about his practice and the "fragile" medium he loves, what he found out about da Vinci and Van Gogh paintings, and how he saw a link between Rembrandt and Francis Bacon looking at an X-ray of Rembrandt's work. Click on the slideshow to see some of the works in situ.
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