MIJU is a dialectical dance of poetic nightmare rendered by Michele Muennig and Juan Carlos Quintana. Their show at Jack Fischer Gallery entitled Effigies and Demagogues is a collaborative plunge into the subconscious of history, be it social or individual, woven into an exquisite corpse of signs from the collective depicting vestigial youth, natural wastelands, imperial dummies, and various bestial transubstantiation. History, once a tangible experience, transforms into magical reality as memory recedes into the shores of abstraction. Accordingly, collaborative projects become surveys over the loss of oneself blurring into the other, as sacrificial abandon in favor of the unknown, and for that reason MIJU's paintings are imbued with the auratic presence of absence.

Bombaster

In Bombaster a figure descends a staircase from the dark corners of an upper floor, dangling a puppet clothed in full military regalia, unmindful of the fact that he himself is a puppet bearing two tragic heads, and crying an existential despair over destiny--either 'manifest' or estranged. This evokes the Nietzschean teleological drama of the death of god, meaning the loss of a grand design and purpose. Furthermore, insects swarm between the two figures in the picture, akin to Andre Masson's Gradiva paintings that were inspired by Freud's case study of the apparent dead coming back to life!

Destiny for the 21st Century Manifested

Another painting, Destiny for the 21st Century Manifested, consisting of a concatenation of failed monuments being dragged by a faceless bourgeoisie across a barren wasteland onward to the abyss, can only remark on the Sisyphean condition of mankind's progress. A mournful chant: "We soon fell/ through the ice/ but fall, fall, fall/ we will" - (translated from the German), echoes through Twilight of the Icy Blue Lament. Such haunting ontology pervades the paintings of MIJU.

Twilight of the Icy Blue Lament

Effigies and Demagogues hovers on Derrida's (R.I.P.) idea of hauntology (in Spectres of Marx), which speculates on the postmodern collapse, or the end of history, whereupon culture will return to ideas that were once considered archaic, obsolete, or "dead"--hence, the "spectre" of the past. (Fundamentalism anyone?) In any case, what better form to suit this tragic end than the so-called zombie medium of painting? Painting as disembodied practice, it's death celebrated again and again, but always coming back as the reflective pool of imaginative essences. Such inspiring display of poetic imagination by MIJU can only be construed as an out of this body experience.

Effigies and Demagogues (a collaboration between Michele Muennig and Juan Carlos Quintana) is on view at Jack Fischer Gallery from August 23 to September 27, 2008.