Zachary Lank (US) "Spent Shells" 2025, oil on canvas, 56 x 106 cm

ZACHARY LANK
Born 1989, Annapolis, Maryland
Lives and works in Brooklyn,

When one imagines the body in nature, the associations flow freely. The edenic connotations are immediate; the human animal, at once one with and so far apart from the natural, is here ensconced in it. Encounters with nature force the issue of one’s frailty, ones embodied-ness, and contrasts it with the massiveness of the landscape. The transcendent and the sublime are never far to hand when contemplating the spectacle of nature and humanity’s place in it, and it is towards these spiritual ends which Zachary Lank’s most recent works angle themselves.

Sumptuous in their handling, Lank’s works position themselves somewhere between Grand Manner portraiture, proto-surreal Metaphysical paintings, and contemporary figurative sensibilities. Tenderly attentive landscapes stretch to their horizons under racing clouds, trees snaking their way into the sky in languid arcs. The scenes are at once pastoral and melancholy, but nowhere is this highlighted more than in the figures themselves.

There, reclined along a log or dangling wistfully from the branches are his empty men. Or, the remains of them, perhaps? Jackets. Trousers. The ephemera of hunting. A glove droops across the barrel of a rifle, certainly limp but is it…empty? Everywhere there is the sense that these objects, traces of a person’s presence presented as the person themselves, are ensouled somehow. Lightly haunted. The whole thing speaks of Rapturous ascent, a miraculous happening, a spiriting away. We are left to wonder at their remains, fittingly posited as hunting portraits; commemorations of pursuit which now easily take on the aspect of a spiritual query.

But there is irony at work here as well. The traditions from which these paintings draw, from the portraits of landed men to the landscapes of the Hudson River School, drown in ideas of ownership and conquest. The sitter was to be portrayed as ruler of his domain, the archetypal predator who had mastered the hunt and the land, and thus mastered himself (for it was almost always a he). This position was sometimes more and sometimes less literal, but the conceit remains that “Nature” is out there, and is to be ruled and overmastered. Not only that, but taming nature, razing its forests and ploughing its meadows, were spiritual goods to be sought after. With true Protestant circularity, as one prospers one’s status among the elect is confirmed, and so the bloody land-grab becomes communion.

Lank’s paintings then are a coy bit of judo, at once framing these ideas as vapid while simultaneously using them to gesture at some further, more rarified truth. The hunt could never be successful, yet it seems that to be hunting is important. The captured game will never satisfy, and so perhaps we must seek more spectral nourishment. What passes for substance may be mere exteriors, a play of appearances, and what is contained, at first glance empty, is found to be the true mark.

Artist Statement, New York 2025