"Steve Rosenblum came, looked at the work, and wasn't very
interested until someone told him, 'They're drawings,'" said Robert
Longo, describing the first time he showed his monumental new "God
Machines" series to the collector and Rosenblum Collection &
Friends founder. "I like the absurdity of taking the medium of
drawing to this scale." The size, naturally, also packs a punch, and
Longo's multi-paneled charcoal renderings of St. Peter's Basilica,
Mecca, and the Wailing Wall currently have viewers doing
double-takes at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (at whose 20th anniversary bash Longo recently played
in his wife's all-artist band, Barbara Sukowa and the
X-Patsys).

Loosely based on collages of downloaded
photographs, Longo's latest works offer eerily-lifelike depictions of
the three holy sites, which serve as centerpieces to the show spanning
Ropac's three-story space in Paris's Marais neighborhood. Flanking these
works are smaller drawings of seemingly unrelated images: a tiger, a
forest, and the windows of John McCain's aircraft, for instance.
The French press has described "God Machines" as "immensely heroic" —
but the words "political" and "apocalyptic" are more often on the lips
of critics and gallerygoers. To the latter description, Longo responds,
"I always get that crap, but it's because people are scared. They don't
realize that there is a degree of hope in everything."

View Slideshow: "There is a Degree of Hope in Everything": Robert Longo on his New Show, "God Machines"

While the detailed representation and dominant chiaroscuro
hearken back to theOld Masters — "I wanted to add a little dog peeing in the corner
but
I couldn't figure out how," Longo joked, referring to the motif of
Dutch 17th-century painter Emanuel de Witte —
"God Machines" is both a continuation of and a departure from Longo's
previous work. The new drawings are in line with "Monsters," his
well-known series of black-and-white, meticulously rendered waves that
blend personal experience with social commentary. Inspired by time spent
teaching his son to surf, the waves series began at first as
psychoanalysis-derived ("The shape of the wave is dictated less by the
weather than by what is underneath it"), but then took on issues of
power, becoming more violent, with the insertion of smoky flames.

His following series of large-scale black-and-white drawings,
"Sickness of Reason," incorporated similar fiery imagery to echo the
tragedy of 9/11. "Someone sent me a printout of the towers falling, but
it came out upside down, so the smoke and the towers looked like an
atomic bomb," Longo said. "I kept thinking about how my children would
have to live with these images." He started perusing old issues of Life
magazine and showed his six-year-old a picture of 1960s nuclear tests.
"He said, 'It's a hurricane, or a tornado,'" the artist recalls. "He
didn't know what it was and then it hit me, that this was man trying to
be nature."
Longo cites the lingering trauma and America's forced "crash-course in
Islam" as influences for his new show. "I knew a little bit about Mecca,
but now I know about the five pillars of the Qur'an, about the Kaaba,
and the Black Stone."

One of the reasons why he has overwhelmingly worked in black and white
can be found in those back issues of magazines he turns to for
inspiration. "I translate photographs," he said. "You have modernist
abstraction and
traditional representation. Somewhere in the middle is where I try to
exist." Marilyn Monroe appears in full color on the cover and
inside one issue of Life, along with coverage of a Paris fashion show.
"I turned the page and saw black-and-white photos from Vietnam, and I
started thinking that maybe I use black-and-white because I somehow
think this is the truth, or real — I don't trust color as much," said
Longo. "Black-and-white is a language through which I understand how to
talk. It's very hard to be original now, you can only hope to, at least,
be real. To me, black and white is the most direct way."

During his work on "God Machines" over the past eight months, Longo's
studio became "a bit like a coal mine," covered in layers of black
charcoal dust that clogged the lungs and left no hand clean. The artist
employs labor-intensive, hands-on methods that involve an old,
high-contrast Xerox machine. "Art is a kind of a commercial that has no
sponsor, it is a product of believing in something," Longo said. "The
scale of the pieces has a lot to do with the expression of that belief. I
want to be able to look at something and remember where I did that. The
problem is that all is see are my mistakes. I drive my wife a little
crazy."

Longo harbors secret dreams of very different kinds of art. "I fantasize
that once I turn 60, I will start using color and become a great
abstract painter," said the 57-year-old artist, who admits to "putzing
around with paint," creating fake Richters, and attempting to
imitate the Old Masters in works that he then hides in a secluded part
of his studio. "I do it on the weekends so none of the guys who work for
me see it," he admited. "They would all laugh at me."