The first picture you see in Marlene Dumas’s show at the Palazzo Grassi is tiny: 30cm by 40cm. From the bottom of the steps leading from the Palazzo’s atrium to the landing on which it hangs, it looks little more than a bloody stain across an otherwise largely blank canvas.
Get closer, and the image coalesces: a kiss, stolen, like so many other Dumas motifs, from a cinematic image (this time, Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne, made in 1936). What sets Dumas apart from so many others who use found images is the painterly details that lift her works beyond the source material and into a painterly realm entirely her own. There, with the brush, she can not just reinterpret it, but seemingly do anything she likes, pushing the limits of absurdity, whether through extreme use of colour, the abrupt abstraction of a body part or face, or apparent bursts of pure painterly reverie. The power of Kissed (2018) is in its polarities: the deep red of the man’s face, the pale blue-lilac of the woman’s cheek—the sky, reflected in the woman’s face, we’re told in a guide with notes written and selected by Dumas with her studio manager Jolie van Leeuwen. In those same notes, Dumas reflects on the ambiguity of her image. After the first kiss, she writes, “there is always the fear of a fall”.