Procession

Procession is the most theatrical painting in Engel's group. Four figures move through a red-brown riverbed under a blue sky banked with clouds, their bodies painted in hot pink, cobalt, crimson and yellow. One figure's torso opens into an actual cloudbank, sky where a chest should be; another carries a skull at the hip; a third lies inverted at the lower edge with a pink wrap around the head and a yellow bloom in hand.

The composition borrows the structure of a classical frieze and then breaks it. The figures are arranged in a shallow band across the picture plane the way a procession would be, but their scale, orientation, and coloring refuse to agree, and the one lying upside down turns the whole reading of the ground on its head.

The skull and the flower are the oldest pairing in painting, and Engel places them without ceremony among bodies that are already half landscape. Sky, water, forest and flesh trade places continuously, so mortality reads less as an event in the painting than as one of the materials it is made from.