Desire Despair

Desire Despair stacks a century of image-making into a single tall column. A monochrome film still of a woman's face sits at the top against gold foliate wallpaper; below her, embracing couples painted in warm flesh tones give way to a cool blue field where symmetrical inkblot forms open across the lower third. The words DESIRE and DESPAIR are lettered vertically through the middle in red and blue, each partly hidden by the figures they cross.

The support is unusual and deliberate. Oil on magnetic vinyl gives the work a commercial feel, closer to signage or display material than to traditional canvas, and that choice puts the painting in the same material world as the advertising imagery it draws from.

Grande has said nothing is off limits, and the painting proves it. Hollywood melodrama, Rorschach psychology, decorative gilt pattern, and hand-lettered typography are set into one another until the narrative collapses. The two words name emotions that mainstream romance keeps carefully separate, and the composition puts them on intersecting axes.

Reading the painting requires moving the eye up and down rather than scanning across, which turns the viewing itself into a descent from the glamour at the top to the dissolution at the bottom.