Pareja Universal XXVI - Oleo sobre tela - 97 X 97 cm,
Pareja Universal XXI - Oleo sobre tela - 100 X 80 cm
Pareja Universal VI - Oleo sobre tela - 97 X 97 cm,
When you first see the Anna Rank's "Couples" series of paintings, you immediately feel you "get it." But it takes awhile for the two halves of your brain to talk to each other and put words to your feelings. With her exquisite paintings of nude couples, Anna has captured perfectly the essence of interpersonal relationship in the early 21st Century.
In this series, the figures are naked and posed in such a way as to indicate that they have just made love, or perhaps tried to make love. We see almost no faces in this series of paintings but instead we see their backs. The couples are barely touching or not touching at all. On further contemplation we realize that the man and woman, who are both looking off in the distance, their gazes are fixed in slightly different directions: they are not even looking at the same thing!
Anna's work is powerful because it goes through us in the all-too-painful realization that we are one or the other in the picture. We are forced to accept that not even making love, or putting it more bluntly, having sex, any longer creates intimacy. We are increasingly part of the wireless cyber world of virtual relationships. We chat with strangers half way around the world who are as likely as not, lying about who they are. We have contact with more people than ever before in human history but the overdose of virtual relationships has accelerated the already declining connection between us all. In couple after couple, we see that we have lost the ability to connect in any meaningful way with another person.
Anna drives the point through our aching hearts that even giving the most private of places of our bodies to one another has become a useless step toward intimacy. We even get the sense of shame in ourselves afterwards, nothing to say to each other, looking off at different things to avoid eye further contact.
Anna has taken two seminal works of the 20th Century: David Riesman's 1965 book, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, and Charlie Chaplan's 1936 film Modern Times, both horrifying indictments of our evolving society, and gone much further by capturing on canvas what has become of the intimacy of Couples as played out in the arena of the bedroom of the 21st Century. It is a shock to realize that what Modern Times now means is that we reached The Lonely Crowd in our most personal of relationship.
Anna Rank's series Couples, will stand for centuries as the definitive statement of the affect and evolution of the technology age human beings. The greatness of
Anna's work lies the haunting question" "How much further can it go?"
James Harley, London, England
Jeffrey Silber, New York, USA, 2006.
Pareja Universal IV - Oleo sobre tela - 97 X 97 cm.
Pareja Universal II - Oleo sobre tela - 2 x 2,40 m.
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