And An Essay Is The Equivalent When You're Talking About Falling In Love With a Painting
"The joy of finding breadcrumbs strategically placed by the artist and following on their path, or the emotional plan for her musical set list, is eternally refreshing."
Upon encountering the paintings of Pia Dehne yesterday, I felt the distinct excitement of having our hometown girl do well, even though our origin hometowns have different reference points and are on entirely separate continents. Nevertheless, the joy of finding breadcrumbs strategically placed by the artist and following their path or tapping into the emotional trajectory for her musical set list is genuinely exciting. And when Pia titles a painting, Lover Ungrateful Number 2, my heart skips a beat. I see a mask-like Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music, staring, glassy-eyed, unblinking, intoning those words, albeit a requiem for an inflatable sex doll. Still, her intent is evident in that, like the song's title, In Every Dream Home, A Heartache, something alarming is at work underneath the meticulously crafted, often pastel splendor of her painted surfaces and imagery.
Lover Ungrateful Number 2, Pia Dehne 2025
Oil on canvas 20 x 16 in (50.80 x 40.64 cm)
"When Pia titles a painting, Lover Ungrateful Number 2, my heart skips a beat. I see a mask-like Bryan Ferry, staring, glassy-eyed, unblinking, intoning the exact words, albeit a requiem for an inflatable sex doll."
Working at Fordham University near the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx, I frequently visit their Desert Conservatory, which is filled with exotic flora, including the glass enclosure for the carnivorous plants. I’ve always been fascinated by the way they partition them off from the curious public, undoubtedly to protect the plants; however, it has always felt as if it was more so to safeguard the patrons. Perhaps the idea of a plant that eats meat sends a potent subconscious threat to visitors, something I imagine Pia would approve of wholeheartedly. In comparison, over the years, we have all internalized Georgia O’Keefe’s powerful lessons in feminine agency and sensuality, yet processed their edge to the point where they would not look out of place in a mural-size advertisement for a cosmetic line or bespoke perfumery. Nevertheless, in Pia’s work, we find a re-investigation of these themes, but from a different generational perspective, one that injects at the genetic level a high quotient of glamorous rock ‘n’ roll and proto-punk with European stylings. Synthesizer knob twiddling and fingering of instruments abound. Of course, there is the domestic and very American paranoic phenomenon of UFOs, bovine abductions, and endless probings, but that is for a bit later. Regardless, the specter of something is lurking just a level or two down, fabulously sequined but, as the Germans say, “unheimlich.”
"In Pia’s work, we find a re-investigation of these themes, but from a different generational perspective, one that injects at the genetic level a high quotient of glamorous rock ‘n’ roll and proto-punk with European stylings."
Those sleek and form-fitting disembodied gloves reach out, a bit edgy, a bit naughty, one hand holding another aggressively at the wrist, very "oh bondage, up yours," and perhaps it is indeed the mercurial shapeshifter Brian Eno, probably also wearing “shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather;" however, I also detect the dangerous and angular model on the stylized cover of the Roxy Music record, For Your Pleasure, with her elbow length, leather gloves, skintight leather dress, and accessorizing with a supremely menacing black panther on a leash. Simultaneously, it is alluring and dangerous, just like Pia’s paintings. For Your Pleasure has all the luxurious glamour, sex, and implied violence that one can hope for in a record cover, and Pia is going referentially heavy on the second offering by Roxy Music, which I appreciate. A sophomore follow-up for any band is a decisive moment, and a shifting focus to the sinister darkness within the details of quotidian routines is a rallying cry for a band moving forward from their freewheeling eclecticism, I would add, as a band that was always an amalgam of several bands simultaneously because the phenomenon of Eno was indeed its own ethereal creature. Too good to be true, supposedly, the cover’s model, Amanda Lear, was the protégé of Salvador Dalí, another element that Pia would appreciate with her nods to Surrealism.
"The surfaces of the paintings are an amalgam of several different image concepts... A small quotient of that advertising and slickness and commodity surrealism comes through along with an obsessive attention to the folding and layering of cloth, as with all the late Renaissance fabric fetishism."
I see Pia in her studio looking up into a painting where the gentle gradients of a soft-hued and expansive sky call out, improbably, for a classic 1950s saucer. And there is Fox Mulder sitting expectantly at his desk, staring up at his infamous poster, hoping for belief and proof that all the intuitions and scraps of evidence will coalesce into something conclusive. With the esotericism and breadth of his knowledge, Mulder would make a solid orchidologist painter like Pia, or perhaps Pia, an exceptional paranormal investigator. In this image of wanting, longing, and belief, we can detect an undeniably exotic undertone of alien existence, something peeking out from underneath, in our peripheral vision, or cleverly woven into the visible fabric directly before us.
The refined surfaces of the paintings are a seamless amalgam of several different image concepts, and though I haven’t thought much of James Rosenquist for many decades since I was a student rolling posters in the Museum of Modern Art bookstore—age appropriately judgmental, of course I used to hiss at his paintings on break—a small quotient of that advertising slickness and stylistic mélange comes through along with obsessive attention to the folding and layering of cloth, as with all the late Renaissance fabric fetishism. The exhilaration of lovingly moving paint impresses upon viewing these paintings; give Pia a bit of folded drapery or the undulating petals of an orchid, and she’s ecstatic, delighted to lavish her attention and hyper-real craft upon specific locations while leaving other areas effectively desaturated and unformed, as precisely delivered in a 15%, 85% ratio in Far Beyond the Pale Horizon.
Far Beyond the Pale Horizon, Pia Dehne 2024
Oil on canvas 60 x 72 in (152.40 x 182.88 cm)
The Rorschach quality of responding to flowers playing musical instruments—elsewhere, there is spectral Eno, resplendent in cheetah-orchid camouflage on a modular synthesizer—is the first hook in the painting Far Beyond the Pale Horizon, more Roxy Music homage, and I kept trying to imagine, based on hand configurations, what cord the “guitarist” was playing. Yes, that is indeed a clarinet-playing orchid, but what note and musical phrase? Of course, if I could sleuth that song, I would have one more parcel of information in her set, and yes, its title is extracted from Virginia Plain, a song on Roxy Music’s first record. I was never terribly adept as a musician, but I am solid as a fan, and looking for the clues in the paintings is part of the thrill of being, or at least feeling like you’re part of something, along with the artist. It’s the same nod of recognition and approval that one gets in a store from an elder noticing the records you have decided upon. I am optimistic that Pia, music lover that she is, has had this experience, and that would be me, with my adolescent buddies in Hoboken’s Pier Platters, holding up Blondie’s Parallel Lines and getting the “nod” from Thurston Moore. Such moments are memorable for young music fans, are they not?
Baby's On Fire, Pia Dehne 2025
Oil on canvas 40 x 30 in (101.60 x 76.20 cm)
In my personal favorite Dave Hickey essay, Romancing the Looky-Loos, Hickey, our visual Lester Bangs, is standing with David Johansen watching the Tuff Darts at CBGB, and a group of suits walk in. The author asks, “Who is that?” to which Johansen’s response is, “Looky-Loos.” Civilians, bystanders, those not authentically invested in the moment, spectators, the non-committal. Suddenly, a sense of community is created in contrast to the interlopers, and yes, this is about Pia, but we miss that dearly departed NY Doll’s powers of perception. So, Pia titles a work Baby’s on Fire, from Eno’s 1973 solo record, Here Come the Warm Jets, and I’m right there with her, knowing that we are all aligned against the common enemy of casual observation as opposed to committed participation, it’s all us, our band, resolutely digging in against lazy indifference. It feels so good to catch this wink, an invitation, although I imagine the paintings work just as well for the uninitiated and horticultural weekend warrior watercolorists.
"[On Oblique Strategies] It is a guidance system that breaks roadblocks and embraces incongruity. I wonder if that saucer floating in the sky results from one of those cards, or as the title of the show states, when you want to make a painting about flowers, and you want to make a painting about aliens, Faced with a Choice Do Both?"
Bacchus, Pia Dehne 2023
Oil on canvas 30 x 40 in (76.20 x 101.60 cm)
Of course, Oblique Strategies, the 1975 deck of one hundred cards designed by Brian Eno to foster new directions and unthought-of possibilities, phantasmagorically pervades this entire body of work. It is an interpretive guidance system that breaks roadblocks and embraces incongruity. I wonder if that saucer floating in the sky results from one of those cards, or as the title of the show states, when you want to make a painting about flowers, and you want to make a painting about aliens, Faced with a Choice Do Both? As the mythical story goes, Eno was convalescing in bed, and someone put a record on at low volume. Unable to get up and alter the amplitude, the balance of the music mixing with the sounds of the vigorous street life entering through the open window formed an automatic minimalist audio collage. Discrete Music and the successive Ambient 1: Music for Airports became the stimuli for a whole genre of Ambient Music, which is, as you expected, is another painting’s title. Influence gives rise to influence, and Erik Satie's "furniture music," music that could mingle, was on Eno's brain, perhaps Pia's as well. As with Eno’s Discrete Music, we also find a level of discretion in Pia’s paintings. There is an analog in the deliberately unobtrusive manner in which her references delicately merge, or mingle, to create a hybrid and overall blended impression, catalyzing connections and creating a visual concord of the most intriguing kind. Pia engages in a variant of visual judo to slyly bring together and reconcile the disparate and, with all due respect, makes a sewing machine and umbrella on a dissecting table seem less inconsistent if that is even possible.
Ambient Music, Pia Dehne 2024
Oil on canvas 32 x 26 in (81.28 x 66.04 cm)
There is a feeling of reverential shrine, mysticism, and site-specificity surrounding this painting.
In the final analysis, a gem of gems, the smallest piece in the exhibition, The Perfect Companion, channeling more sumptuous and menacing Roxy Music, is intimately tucked in its alcove, solitary, on the left of the gallery. One could conceivably miss it entirely or catch it as an afterthought on the way out—yet another nod from the artist and gift for those invested in engagement. Like a niche holding a saint’s knucklebone or other holy relic first-class body parts in an alcove, there is a feeling of reverential shrine, mysticism, and site-specificity surrounding this painting. From the folding altar-like space of the three-walled recess, something vaguely feline stares you eye to eye—for me, at least—sixty inches off the ground, and perhaps it is a not-to-distant relative of that dangerously perfect creature on the Roxy Music For Your Pleasure cover. Like the Carravaggios patiently waiting unsecured in the humid darkness of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, this creature, like the voluptuous horror displayed in The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, Pia’s The Perfect Companion, is beyond doubt tremendously alluring and potentially lethal, exceedingly pretty but undeniably not vacant in the least. With Pia’s paintings, as with the carnivorous plants in the desert in the Bronx, I am simply incapable of staying away, though perhaps I should, and as the filmmaker Werner Herzog says of the fertile and murderous jungle surrounding him during his production of Fitzcarraldo, “I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.”
The Perfect Companion, Pia Dehne 2025
Oil on canvas 15 x 12 in (38.10 x 30.48 cm)
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Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock is a New York-based artist and educator whose work has been exhibited internationally, with shows across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He has lectured at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Harvard University and was a resident artist in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s WorldViews program at the World Trade Center. With teaching experience spanning Tokyo, Rome, and New York, he is currently a professor at Fordham University, where he is the Head of the Visual Arts Program and Fordham College Rose Hill Dean Fellow.
This essay was written the day after seeing Pia Dehne’s "Faced with a Choice Do Both" at Isabel Sullivan Gallery.
