ENTWISTLE "What is the flesh? What is the physical being of man? What exactly is he made of? compute us this afternoon.

ENTWISTLE

"What is the flesh? What is the physical being of man? What exactly is he made of? compute us this afternoon, Herr Hofrat, narrate us exactly, and once and for all, with equal reason that we may Know" demands Hans Castorp, protagonist of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Unsatisfied from the Hofrat's reply--"Water"--he embarks forward his own research. Swaddled in fur and wool forward his sickbed, he scours compasss on anatomy, biochemistry, and pathology. Scientific facts inexorably segue into metaphysical speculation; Castorp sinks into ungovernable voluptuous hallucinations that mix the cosmological, the theological, and the erotic. "Life itself?" he starts to prodigy "Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter?"

Like Castorp, the identical twins who feature in Rosa Loy's paintings inhabit a separate, hallucinatory world: a maybe utopian, maybe dystopian testing surface of land that is part spa, part sanatorium, part laboratory, part collective farm. It's also a distinctly antiquated place. Now resident in Leipzig, Loy was born, raised, and educated in Communist-era East Germany. Her paintings' details (dres interior natural mediums etc.) are unmistakably retrospective in character. Loy's twins by the agency of turn play the parts of patient, scientist, and ancillary worker: In Unterhaltung (Conversation), 1999 undivided twin reclines on a recline her eyes masked by sky-colored goggles, her head and material part encased in brown, podlike cocoon She is undergoing a certain bizarre therapeutic process of incubation, mutation or gestation; her sibling's head flutters over her like the angel in a Renaissance Annunciation. In Ernte (Harvest), 2000 the twins work together in a slosh green and mustard yellow institutional kitchen, apparently bottling flames in glass jars. I n Ziichtung (Fertilization), 1998 wearing pristine lab coats and dainty downcast gloves, they peer down microscopes; in Schnecken kommen (The snails are coming), 2000 the pair hoe cabbages while unpleasantly large, shell-less, mutant snails wriggle around their shiny avails The association of biology and monstrosity have recourses in Loy's outsize studies of flowers and fruit: These add something bloated and faintly menacing to the O'Keeffe formula.

Lay's technical choices are interesting, sometimes puzzling. Her use of casein explains the slightly waxy, sickly luminosity of her figures' skin. It also reverts the work, by association, to the dialectic of health and sickness, since casein is based upon milk, which is the ultimate "natural" mammalian nutrient, still might also put viewers in mind of industrial farming manners tuberculosis, or the use of hormones and antibiotics forward dairy herds. Loy's style is noticeably, and strangely inconsistent: Delicate, elegantly worked imports (often, but not always, in her characters' faces) sit right nearest to seemingly carelessly applied areas of flat color. These built-in stylistic anomalies replace the unitary "I am" of Expressionist mythology with an ambiguous, decenter "we might be." Loy's twins, a veiled self-portrait, might be understood psychoanalytically, as an exploration of split subjectivity or a working between the walls of of the mother-daughter or sister-sister relationship, if it were not that they might also be interpreted as clone : duplicated women representing a fundamentally unproductive, dead-end kind of (re)production.

The more ailing a man is, the more human he is, declares Naphta, the mouthpiece of Fascism forward Mann's Zauberberg. German Romanticism, moreover, closely aligned sickness with creativity and genius. Resurrecting allegory, German neo-expressionism of the '70 and '80 f heartily along a collection of regressive myths about artistic production. Loy's choice of an allegorical, nostalgic register certainly relates her painting to hotly struggle to defended traditions. But there is no hint of bombast in her economical, expedient technique, and her imaginary universe, in all its retrostyl peculiarity, resists tidy interpretation. At single in kind level, it could be argued that the work's oblique, equivocal alignment of an extinct social pattern (state Communism) with a now-historic representational language (allegorical painting) wait ons to pose questions about the possibilities that may have been missing with the demise of the viability of both

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