Untitled 2020

Aaron Nagel made this untitled portrait using oil on canvas. The halo and the upward gaze suggests a religious iconography, but here, the composition is emptied of its traditional content. The painting speaks to our contemporary moment, where technology allows us to encounter traditional images, which are drained of their traditional meaning and re-presented to us as fragments. Nagel’s piece questions the status of images in contemporary society. It asks us to consider how portraits and figure paintings still manage to shape our perceptions, even in the absence of social and institutional authority. To know more, we would need to dig deeper into the artistic environment Nagel operated in and the institutional settings for the display and sales of paintings in the early 21st century.