There’s something about the tiny image of death as a sickle-wielding skeleton astride a Norwegian rat shitting out a yellow plume over the city of Naples that comically, movingly, and perfectly captures the way a pandemic can lay waste to a place. Alexis Rockman’s “Plague in the Kingdom of Naples, 1656-1658” (2024) manifests the personification of death and its rodent stead in a realist manner, while the city of Naples is reduced to abstractions as drips, blobs, and hurriedly painted buildings, conveying how the plague that killed an estimated 1.25 million people, including half of the city, left chaos in its wake.
That gestural urbanscape might feel familiar to those of us who sheltered in cities ravaged by our recent pandemic. Our memories of those seemingly endless days of anxiety and death only a few years ago can be hazy, even abstract, and we might continue to actively push them away. That might explain why we’re stuck with the rerun of a Trump presidency, as people have actively forgotten the havoc a coronavirus under the leadership of an anti-science zealot can unleash.
The clear art historical reference in this exhibition, titled Naples: Course of Empire, is Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire (1833–36) cycle, which hangs at The New York Historical (formerly New-York Historical Society). Rockman’s homage adds two more seasons, ranging into eras Cole’s serial never attempted, including the Triassic era of 2 million years ago to a post-human world, bringing the full sweep of paintings to seven.
While Cole’s paintings are constructed in proportions that echo the golden ratio, with the fitting exception of “The Consummation of Empire,” since it depicts the world gone awry, Rockman prefers a more cinematic panel. The scale of his paintings is very close to but not exactly the 2.39:1 aspect ratio seen as ideal for recent cinema, turning them into big screens while challenging the supremacy of the pixel by showing us what paint can do.
This is an ambitious series, and by choosing Naples, a great city that never quite regained its status as a world capital, the artist also reminds us that time is long, while our memories and reign of power are not. Indeed, each of these paintings suggests that the larger plague is us, and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, as seen in “Post Human: Palazzo Donn’Anna” (2024), will only arrive when we disappear. That dystopic tone seems fitting as we look ahead — we may be beginning to realize that this version of humanity doesn’t deserve to be renewed for another season.
Alexis Rockman’s Naples: Course of Empire continues at Magenta Plains (149 Canal Street, Chinatown, Manhattan) through March 1.
