Installation view, Robert Longo: Storm of Hope, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, 2020- 2021 Big dripping brushstrokes people get all excited about, you know? The fact is that messiness is in my work if you get really close to it. I think the fact that people really want to see labor, they want to see expressions and things like that. It always reminds me of how little people actually look and when they realize that they’re actually not photographs they look much more. They do use that trick that you think that they’re photographs. What is the first impression that you hope to give the viewer when confronting your work? The hand referenced in “White Glove for Leon” is actually a clue. Despite the expansive scale of Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery space in Los Angeles, the images tower over the viewer and effortlessly fill the vast interior. The works presented in “Storm of Hope” reflects many of the principles that guide your artistic practice as they relate to the theme, scale, and medium. It is the first time in recent memory that a call to the East Coast truly feels like a long-distance transmission. The phone rings and connects with Robert Longo in his New York City studio. Robert Longo’s large-scale drawings ask that we pause for a moment longer than we would normally look at photographs to consider the weight of the subjects, find the evidence of his hand rendering shades of charcoal and look ahead to the hope that comes to light after the final cloud has passed. The artist captures moments that are ingrained in our collective anxiety and reflective of our slow and gnawing tendency to engage in “doom scrolling.” A global pandemic, the threat to democracy, the fight for racial equality and civil rights, a desire to find permanence among displacement, an effort to rebuild after merciless natural disasters, right the wrongs of climate change, and reclaim our place as a community and as a people. Robert Longo looks to the unflinching photographic documentation of these moments and renders them by hand so that they become the most iconic and captivating versions. The phrase is anthemic and poignant in that it speaks to the eye of the storm that we have found ourselves in- one unprecedented rain after another.

This year has been a ‘Storm of Hope,” in many ways.

Echo Storm instal the new