Charcoal to slow down the image flood

Robert Longo, one of the Pictures Generation’s defining artists, takes over the four floors of Pace Gallery until October 25 with the exhibition ‘The Weight of Hope’. Monumental charcoal drawings transform images from today’s fleeting media storms - wars, protest, natural disasters - into something permanent and contemplative.

The precision of Longo’s technique is remarkable. Only on close inspection do you realize these aren’t photographs but the meticulous work of a human hand. Longo transforms the pixels of press images into hyperrealistic charcoal drawings. The texture and tonal depth compel viewers to pause in the midst of our image-saturated world - and truly look.

Longo’s way of styling tragic events walks a fine line. When he heightens shadows, shifts scale, or recenters a composition, is he clarifying reality or changing it? Images of refugees at sea, bombed-out shops, firefighters in California wildfires, and glaciers in mid-collapse don’t need help speaking. In current environment where images are often controlled or manipulated, every edit matters. Still, Longo creates a space for debate and maybe that is the point: to make us look again, not just at the catastrophe but at how it is presented and framed.

At seventy-two, Longo remains both showman and moralist. His large-scale charcoal drawings carry the same cinematic force and technical polish that defined his 1980s work, but now with a quieter, more reflective tone. Some see ‘The Weight of Hope’ as aesthetic stagnation or recycling of the Pictures-Generation tactics; for others it is a necessary insistence on slowing down the image stream that we usually scroll past without thinking. The work does not resolve the contradictions of political art - and it doesn’t claim to. Instead, it stages those tensions head-on, backed by extraordinary craft.

In the end, the exhibition functions less as a statement than a test: what do we expect an image — document, accuse, mourn, or warn? Longo doesn’t answer for us. He slows the scene down, enlarges it, and hands the responsibility back to the viewer. The rest is on our eyes.