by Step inside the rave. On the left is euphoria: topless dancers lost in the moment. Straight ahead is the chillout area: your friends over each other, their bodies screaming red, yellow and blue under the lights. But the real wildness is happening to your left: the blur of bodies in the dark, with gangly penises, parted buttocks and shaved mouths gradually coming into focus.
The only thing missing from this room full of hedonism is the music, because this nightclub is not a nightclub at all. Instead, it’s It’s Night, an exhibition of life-size paintings by Israeli artist Doron Langberg. They shamelessly record the pleasures of various nights out in strange spaces, from dancing to sex to beach holidays. It was a subject that Langberg wasn’t sure about tackling at first.
“There was something in me that felt, ‘Oh, this can’t be the subject of a show,'” says the 39-year-old as he walks me around the gallery. “It’s too frivolous. There is too much fun and excitement.” Langberg’s previous works have included landscapes, still lifes and portraits of his friends and lovers – things he feels everyone can relate to. “While these are experiences that not everyone has … not many people outside of this community have access to these spaces.”
Still, many people have formative moments in clubs, and who wouldn’t be the least bit interested in a picture like Dark Room (Underwear Party), which offers a bird’s-eye view (“almost an out-of-body experience ”) of the disclosure. bodies intertwined in one smudged, swirling orgiastic mass?
“A lot of that one was painted with my hands,” says Langberg. He likes to make a connection with the sensitivity of the paint: the way it feels to hit it on the canvas, or stroke it across. “I almost wanted to recreate that feeling of going through that crowd of people, where everyone is touching you and you’re touching everyone else.”
Langberg grew up in Yokneam Moshava, a small agricultural settlement in Israel, and produced his first oil painting – of Ariel from The Little Mermaid – when he was just six years old. His father was a mathematics professor and his mother a teacher of psychology and child development, but they lived surrounded by farming neighbors. “It was very quiet: we were near the mountains and it was green and beautiful and we would go for a walk.”
He did his national service, working as an airplane mechanic, before going on to study art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and then at Yale. As an undergraduate, Langberg was drawn to painting sex scenes, though he wasn’t sure why at the time. “People want to know why, because it has to be justifiable,” he says. “But I was in my early 20s when I did those works. And I think, at the time, queerness was sex.” Since then he has been trying to push the boundaries of what queerness means. “Just growing as a person, I wanted my work to describe different kinds of experiences.”
Langberg has already spoken about giving a quieter perspective to paintings such as a landscape, or a picture of his brothers wandering. How does he do this? It was a question he struggled to answer until a studio colleague pointed out: “why a straight landscape? Likewise, why should it be my duty, as a horrible person, to make it more trivial, on the assumption that it is not so?” He laughed: “So it’s not like ‘this piece of paint is gay’. But perhaps there is a series of experiences that structure our way of being in the world. And through that you can look at different things.”
After graduating, Langberg’s paintings expanded to tender scenes of lovers, friends and siblings. As a result of such works he was labeled as part of a group known as the New Queer Intimists – a collection of young artists including Louis Fratino and Salman Toor who build on the ideas of the original intimists Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. With the recent pandemic still looming and our reliance on digital communication diminishing the need for face-to-face contact, the time feels right for pictures that could give us a human connection. “When I graduated, it was about process-based abstraction,” says Langberg. “If you talked about relationships or anything remotely emotional, it would be so bad. Now there is a greater willingness to see these connections as valuable things to make art.”
We head upstairs for the after-party: pictures showing the night melting away from the former club. Perhaps the most notable is The Walk Back (Underwear Party), which shows two figures walking home from a party on New York’s Fire Island. Is it supposed to be joyful? Because of its murky greens, browns and blacks, it is more like to me something that Paul Nash could conjure up, two figures crossing lonely trenches.
Langberg is very interested in my answer. Then he tells me that the painting took four months because he was struggling with “the medium of nature at night, without reflecting artificial light … I had to paint it several times before I was satisfied with it. And all this was going on during the war [in Gaza] was going on. My brothers saw what I was working on and said that the outside world was seeping into my work.” The conflict, he says, was “sad” and “unacceptable to watch”.
The next picture, of a friend recuperating on the sofa as the sun rises, comes almost as a relief – a burst of light and colour, more like Langberg’s previous works. “When people are staring into space, or imagining… that’s when they’re most themselves,” says Langberg. “That’s when I’ll be able to access most of my content.”
And then the party is over, sadly: it’s just a memory of those great moments of transcendence. Or are they? “I think pictures themselves can be transcendent experiences,” notes Langberg before I leave. “That we will be able to look at something from a different time, from a different context, and experience what the painter is depicting vividly. It’s interesting to fulfill both of those things.”
• Doron Langberg: The night is at Victoria Miro, London, until March 28
