Robert Longo at Metro Pictures

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

If memory serves, back in the bombastic 1980s, an article about the hot artists of the moment--Robert Longo, David Salle, Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel--ran under the title "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." While that appellation dripped with the lurid overstatement of the moment, in Longo's case it seems prescient. His most recent works, very large charcoal drawings based on documentary photographs of atomic bomb tests from the '40s and '50s, are chillingly beautiful in a way not unlike the imagery in the Book of Revelations.

Each drawing presents a single mushroom cloud rising majestically above an unpeopled horizon. One is struck by variations in the forms these deadly blasts can assume. Some shoot straight upward before exploding into glowing blossoms, while others seem to simultaneously burst upward and downward, covering the lower half of drawings with billowing waves of smoke. Ironically, in light of their deadly effects, all evoke organic metaphors. They bring to mind trees, flowers and branching foliage breaking into bloom before our eyes. Longo's drawings lovingly reproduce the peculiar effects of nuclear light that tips the edges of some clouds with glowing halos, leaves others as ominous dark masses and transforms some into incandescent torches.

Rising to a height of 6 or 7 feet, these drawings tower over the viewer. They remind us that Longo has always had a cinematic sense of scale, exploiting size in his drawings and sculptures to evoke a sense of awe. In the past that awe often seemed a bit artificial, as the horrors invoked--the falling revelers, the corporate behemoths or the cybermonsters--seemed the stuff of Hollywood fantasy. A few years ago, images of mushroom clouds might have operated in a similar way. Today, however, these works hit us on a different level.

In the front gallery are single works from other recent series. One is an enlarged drawing of Albert Einstein's disheveled office in Princeton. The hastily scrawled notations on the blackboard, we can't help thinking, could be the template for the blasts depicted in the next room. Another drawing is marginally less unsettling, depicting crashing breakers glistening in the moonlight. The third, however, leads nicely into the mushroom clouds. Titled Launch (Rocket), it represents a streak of light that unites sky and ground in a lightning flash that is both thrilling and frightening.

The same can be said of the mushroom clouds. The irony of the late 20th century has given way to the paranoia of the 21st. In this context, the show's title, "The Sickness of Reason" is, sadly, all too appropriate.

--Eleanor Heartney