Jake Troyli and the Grotesque Spectacle of Selves
by Jasmine Wahi
Introduction
I first fell in love with Jake Troyli’s work when his painted visage with trademark horned eyebrows appeared on the April 2019 cover of New American Paintings (for the record: I recently discovered, much to my delight, that those horned eyebrows are in fact Troyli’s actual eyebrows from as far back as his mother can remember). I was struck by the absurdity of the painting. It emulated formal Dutch/Flemish Renaissance portraiture in both composition and technique; yet was definitively informal, subversive even, with the figure clad in a rumpled gray RIOT T-shirt. I think I guffawed, perhaps a snort was involved? What I did not know then, but have come to learn and admire over time, are the levels of depth, nuance, and coded metaphor embedded within Troyli’s works. What appears absurd, even.
His inclination towards fifteenth-century Flemish painting is far more than aesthetic or even technical, although process is important to the work. Troyli’s work incorporates a myriad of elements that are often omnipresent in Northern Renaissance paintings and recalibrates them into his paintings. From the articulation of exaggerated emotions–humor, terror, vulnerability, pleasure, anxiety–to layers of complex narrative and multi-interpretive (coded) symbolism that defined the genre, Troyli takes that which was canonized in the zeitgeist of ‘good’ (Western) art history and makes it his own.
Troyli’s latest exhibition at moniquemeloche, SLOW CLAP, pushes this nod to the Netherlandish into new territory. It expands a singular narrative into a smorgasbord of intersecting vignettes that not only act as a window into the artist’s experience, but also more importantly, hold up a mirror to our own culture of spectacle, exploitation, violence, and voyeurism.
Where’s Jake?
Like Troyli’s earlier series, SLOW CLAP burrows into the realities and relations between violence, capitalism, exploitation, and entertainment; the symbiotic dynamic of viewer and viewed, consumer and consumed, and the undergirdings of a toxic American Whiteness. Troyli employs a strategy of simultaneous scenes within a scene, and the use of multiple specific character tropes to complicate social realities that may seem simple to deconstruct but actually exist in a world of grayness that is not either/or but both/and. Under the cool, bright lights in the gallery, Troyli’s vignettes come alive. Satisfyingly precise lines and saturated colors make up a multi-arena theater-like spectacle. The exhibition is anchored by two massive paintings, the exhibition’s namesake Slow Clap, 2022, and The Doorbuster Deal, 2022. These two works are simultaneous multi-narrative tableaus. Each painting is an organized chaos of situations within one picture. Using the quasi-bird’s eye perspective, the spread of both paintings depicts strange, absurd, and often disturbing events happening concurrently. These two paintings hold within them a key to the artist’s larger oeuvre as a self-aware critic of the sharp and often painful multilayered complexity of this country as a fractured and Venn diagrammed nation: White America, Black America, in the convergent power dynamics that erupt from the center.
Each painting feels like the contemporary progeny of Martin Hanford’s popular puzzle-book series Where’s Waldo and early-Netherlandish painter Heironymous Bosch’s allegorical altarpieces, such as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1515), The Haywain Triptych (1516), and Day of Judgement (1482). Troyli’s large paintings muddle the most notable elements of Hanford’s illustrations (the multiples of a single primary subject) and Bosch’s vignettes, which often feel like carnivals filled with oddities, grotesqueries, and biblical violences.
The Jakes
Like Hanford’s Waldo illustrations, both Slow Clap and The Doorbuster Deal, feature a mob of identical ‘primary’ subjects. In line with his earlier paintings, Troyli’s larger pieces here are self portraits. In this exhibition, he is featured over and over and over again.
The multiple Jakes are markedly unpainted, except for the whites of the eyes, which pop against the tinted woodgrain. The burnt sienna of the underpainting serves as melanated thin skin. It feels unfinished yet intentional, as though the artist is not quite sure if he wants his many selves to be solidly present. Light graphite marks define all other areas of the figure from the hightop fades to the gargantuan flaccid penises, which are a cheeky nod to the racist stereotype that Black men are always well-en- dowed. The Jakes are mostly nude, save for the occasional car salesman-jacket-cum- clip-on-tie, police cap, American flag singlet, or Lady Liberty dress. It is worth noting that the top-only attire is meant to feel awkward and uncomfortable (in conversations with the artist’s mother she said ‘it’s not the nudity that bothers me, I’m used to that. It’s just the weirdness of pantslessness that is off-putting’– I wholeheartedly agree).
The Jakes are an odd, mostly passive cast of redundant characters. They appear to be clones, churned out in a manner as mundane and inhuman as the cars popping out in The Doorbuster Deal. They are archetypes, signifying a tropic construct of Black maleness and the idea that Black men are, to an extent, interchangeable in the eyes of a voyeuristic and consuming White American public(s). Although these Jakes all participate in multiple disparate actions across multiple simultaneous scenarios, they are oddly all similar in their expressions. Not one Jake smiles or looks angry; each figure is on a spectrum of confusion, from dumbfoundedness to mild bemusement.
It is their redundancy in spite of circumstance that makes the Jakes so perplexing. In one context, they present to us the idea of multiple selves; the dismantling of exterior reductive perspectives (read: White gaze) that flatten Black and Brown people down to caricatures. In another sense, their identicalness implies a type of hegemony in opposition to the idea of individuality and human complexity. Either way one contextualizes the cadre of Jakes, one thing is clear: they are meant to cause squeamishness–the kind that makes you laugh and titter out of discomfort. They are uniquely self-deprecating, and in that blundering state, are an accusatory foil against the viewer who consumes them.
Like the human/humanoid figures in Bosch’s triptychs, the Jakes participate in a variety of different pastimes that range from the seemingly whimsical (i.e. popping champagne in the top left corner of Slow Clap) to the overtly violent (i.e. burning another Jake at the stake). They function in an ecosystem of different activities that are all inextricably linked through an agenda of exploitative labor and performance for White-Capitalistic entertainment/satisfaction.
In The Doorbuster Deal, the Jakes spread out across a hybridized Motocross-car-carnival event (perhaps a nod to Troyli’s Florida roots). The coinciding events are not necessarily presented in any hierarchical chronology, they simply happen parallel to each other; a galaxy of con- temporaneous experiences. In one section, the multi-Jakes operate in various parts of an auto plant. Some figures weld on the assembly line, overseen by Ghost-like figures. Others get fitted for emerald green car salesman jackets, with their pensises and bare feet exposed. A small group of Jakes talk about other Black figurative artists–namely Nina Chanel Abney–whose portrait of a basketball player hangs on the wall adjacent to an early Troyli painting. This scene is particularly important in light of the recent feverous ‘trend’ of White collectors buying Black figurative and narrative paintings, setting a precarious dichotomy in the secondary market which potentially harms Black artists in a market bubble. It is a critique not of the artists, but of the idea of ‘trend’ and ‘collection’ of Black culture while systemic violence persists against Black people in America.
Further up on the surface, events take a more violent turn: a group of billy club wielding cop- Jakes beats a stiff figure on the flat grass. It’s unclear if the horizontal rigor figure is dead or simply disassociating from the moment. Equally stiff figures crash and burn in their newly minted cars, while another multi-Jake is dragged by his ankles out of sight, out of mind. In another building, multi-Jakes move on an illuminated dance floor. Their hands reach to the sky in a coded articulation that can either signal dancing or the symbolic gesture of ‘hands up (don’t shoot).’ Back out- side, flayed Jake-skins drape over a high truss above a single multi-Jake who looks dually nonplussed but uncurious. Tall Boys (known more commonly as Wacky Wavy Inflatable Tube Men) whip around pregnant with double meaning. Seemingly innocuous, these whimsical symbols of commerce originated as caricatures of Afro-Caribbean men. No element of this painting can be singularly defined or interpreted. Slow Clap is as jam packed with nefarious undertones as The Doorbuster Deal.
Slow Clap also explores a realm of commerce and entertainment. Set in another hybridized environment that is part carnival, part nationalistic sports event, part celebrity junket, Slow Clap is also a collection of off-putting sideshow events. A line of Jakes in American flag singlets line up for an impossible dive. Above/ behind them, another line of Jakes stand before a firing squad of other selves.
Hedge saws held by swine-pink hands cut through a line of hightops. Perspective collapses and more violence unfolds with uncannily realistic German shepherds running down multi- Jakes as they approach a finish line. It is unclear if the yellow ‘do not cross’ tape will save the runner-Jakes from the onslaught of police dogs. A room of audience-Jakes watches other performer-Jakes on a stage where the scenic backdrop morphs into the exterior landscape. One performer watches a cane slide towards him to wrench him from the stage. A Jake is burned like a Salem witch by other Jakes in the sunny courtyard; a nod, perhaps, to the idea that White supremacy is not only executed by White people.
Inset within this architecture is a triangular ‘keystone’ room. A keystone because, while small, it is an anchorpoint within the painting that conveys the overarching sentiment of surrender to a chaotic world. A single multi-Jake hand emerges waving a white flag. It is a minute, almost missable moment that encapsulates a sentiment of resigned exhaustion, a grim acceptance.
The entire scene(s) is witnessed by a gaggle of onlooking eyes peering from the darkness. These eyes are eerily similar to the white eyes of the ‘Ghost Boys’ (my own term)–the trans- lucent, shoe-clad, ghost figures who sporadically lurk in both Slow Clap and The Doorbuster Deal.
Ghost Boys
As bystanders or witnesses, their passivity indicates a type of implicit violence. Non-intervention against brutality is akin to participation. Their spectral presence prompts a multitude of questions: Who are the Ghost Boys in relationship to the Jakes? Are they avatars of Troyli? The opacity of their skinny pinkish legs indicates that they may not be a Jake, but instead in the same category as the anonymous hands that saw off the Jakes’ coiffed hightops (Slow Clap) or belong to the angry-baby- faced man who grips Troyli’s body in the painting Superfan, 2021. What is the function (or functions) of the Ghost Boys? Are they the mirror of the viewer? Witnessing but not intervening? Inconsequential voyeur? Patron? Are they overseers or undertakers? What is their status? Rich or poor? Powerful or imprisoned? Teacher or Student? Are they all or none of the above? The absurd illegibility of the Ghost Boys’ purpose is intentional. It is an indication of the muddiness of Troyli’s world that runs in parallel to ours. The confounding state of the world is not only expressed in the largest paintings in the exhibition, it is also acutely articulated in the satellite paintings that mine from the multi figure works.
Satellite Paintings
Similar in style to Troyli’s earlier works, the satellite paintings function both on their own and as excerpts of the worlds rendered in Slow Clap and The Doorbuster Deal. These works orbit the larger pieces, creating a galaxy of selves oriented around the larger multi-event stage. Out To Dry, 2022 for example, is a zoomed-in lens on the boneless skinbag-Jakes hanging on a line in The Doorbuster Deal. This Jake is more solidly and fully rendered than the underpainted figures in the large tableau. Cushy and buttery buttcheeks pop against the cerulean sky, making the Jake feel more present than spectral. In a similar fashion, On Your Marks, 2021 could be a (clothed) starter-gun-wielding Jake from Slow Clap kicking off the race/chase. Hovering be- hind, a beady-eyed Ghost Boy side-eyes the placidly smiling Jake.
The focused nature of these works reveals another important but less obvious idea that subtly threads through the exhibition. The scenes illustrate the tension between the rigid American expectations set forth for Black people to play into a role of Black exceptionalism or buffoon-ery. Troyli asserts that American society demands a type of rigid performativity and archetypal reductiveness that is either perfection (Black exceptionalism) or unintelligent. These constructed roles leave no room for the multidimensionality and nuance of real personhood. There is no room for Blunderability, for the messiness of human reality. The figures in all of the paintings in SLOW CLAP play into these tropes as a way to demonstrate the absurdity and goofiness of these close-up images.
Conclusion
The power of all of the paintings in SLOW CLAP is in both the conceptual and visual layered- ness. The large paintings in particular are the type of pictures that never get old: it is virtually impossible to ever truly grasp everything that is happening across the picture plane. There is no way to neatly package all of the nuances with a holistic lens of the work. Instead, one must embrace the multi-dimensional multitudes within the work and know that there is no concrete or succinct answer to the questions and problems that they pose. It is enough to know that it will never be enough, that an indictment of society’s voyeurism does not have to be spelled out, that criticism and complexity can exist as nebulous and undefinable realities. That is truly the magic of Troyli’s paintings in SLOW CLAP–the elements coalesce into something that is both real but wholly undefinable because of its multidimensional complexity.
