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Sunday 16 February

Jesse Mockrin: The Surgeon of the Baroque

Published on: 3 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 5 minutes

Jesse Mockrin dissects European masterpieces with surgical precision, transforming their fragments into sharp commentaries on gender and power. Her virtuosic technique creates hauntingly androgynous figures that challenge our certainties about the representation of the body in art.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Let me tell you about Jesse Mockrin (born in 1981 in Silver Spring, Maryland), an artist shaking the foundations of our beloved Western art history with delicious insolence. I’ve seen her deconstruct European masters with surgical precision that would make a coked-up neurosurgeon blush.

First, let’s dive into her subversive reappropriation of classical works. This isn’t just a cut-and-paste job to dazzle the crowd, like some contemporary artists who recycle art history with the grace of an elephant in a china shop. No, Mockrin practices true aesthetic surgery on these historical paintings. She dissects them, fragments them, and recomposes them with such mastery that even Roland Barthes would lose his Latin over the death of the author. Her diptychs and triptychs aren’t mere stylistic exercises—they create temporal ruptures that shatter our certainties about the representation of the body and gender.

Take her mannerist hands, those fingers that seem to dance on the canvas like elegant tentacles. It’s Bronzino on acid, Rubens on a bad trip. The artist pushes elegance to the point of absurdity, where beauty becomes grotesque. These impossible hands, stripped of their joints, tell a deeper story about our collective obsession with aesthetic perfection. It’s Judith Butler meets Jacques Derrida in a baroque hammam.

And let’s talk about her technique! Her black backgrounds aren’t just decorative voids to look “profound”. No, they’re theatrical spaces transforming each fragment into a dramatic scene worthy of the finest baroque operas. Her technical mastery is so precise it’s almost indecent. At least three layers of paint for every skin tone, obsessively blended until the flesh becomes as smooth as an iPhone screen. The result? Figures that oscillate between hyperrealism and unsettling artificiality, as if Raphael’s Madonna merged with a storefront mannequin.

Mockrin isn’t here to lull us with illusions about the grandeur of Western art. She takes these canonical works, these paintings before which generations of curators have swooned, and transforms them into biting commentaries on our era. Her appropriations aren’t respectful homages—they’re sophisticated acts of cultural piracy exposing the gender biases and social constructs hidden in our artistic heritage.

Look at how she handles light in her recent works. It’s no longer the dramatic chiaroscuro of her early days but a more complex luminosity that plays with our expectations. She creates impossible backlights, shadows defying physical logic. It’s as if Caravaggio had access to Photoshop and thought, “Why not?” This manipulation of light isn’t just a visual effect—it’s a metaphor for how we continue to manipulate and recontextualize historical images in the digital age.

What I particularly admire is her treatment of gender and identity. Her figures are hauntingly androgynous, as if she had taken the canons of masculine and feminine beauty and run them through a blender. The result? Beings defying easy categorization, forcing us to question our own biases about gender. It’s Judith beheading Holofernes meets Saint Sebastian in an intellectual BDSM club.

Her references to art history aren’t mere pedantic citations. When she appropriates a Venus or a Lucretia, she doesn’t just reproduce the image—she deconstructs it to reveal the mechanisms of power and desire underpinning it. It’s like she’s taking the “male gaze” theorized by Laura Mulvey and turning it against itself with vengeful elegance.

Her recent works on mirrors and vanity are particularly striking. She takes this classic motif of the woman with a mirror, so cherished by male painters who loved depicting “female vanity”, and transforms it into a complex reflection on perception and self-representation. These works aren’t just comments on contemporary narcissism in the age of selfies—they reveal how power structures and societal expectations continue to shape our relationship with the image.

What’s most fascinating is her ability to play with time. Her works create dizzying temporal shortcuts where the baroque meets Instagram, and martyred saints brush shoulders with K-pop stars. This isn’t cheap postmodern kitsch—it’s a deep reflection on how images travel through time and space, accumulating and transforming their meanings.

The drapery in her paintings isn’t just a technical showcase. It becomes a character in its own right, masses of fabric engulfing the pictorial space with an almost menacing presence. It’s as if she takes baroque conventions—where drapery symbolized wealth and power—and pushes them to the absurd, turning these signifiers of social status into critical commentaries on our own obsession with appearances.

Her technique is almost maniacally precise. The skin tones of her figures are worked with such meticulousness that they become unsettling—too perfect to be real, like porcelain masks hiding something more disturbing. It’s a subtle comment on our age obsessed with Instagram filters and digital perfection.

What makes her work so relevant today is her ability to reveal the historical continuities in our relationship with images. When she paints a toiletry scene inspired by the 18th century, she shows us that our contemporary rituals of beauty and self-presentation are merely the latest avatars of a long history of social performance and identity construction.

Her work on historical scenes of violence is particularly striking. By fragmenting and recontextualizing these images, she forces us to truly look at the violence underlying so many of our Western “masterpieces”. It’s not gratuitous sensationalism—it’s an invitation to reflect on how art has historically aestheticized and normalized violence, particularly violence against women.

Mockrin isn’t here to comfort us with pretty pictures. She uses beauty as a Trojan horse to introduce deeper questions about power, gender, violence, and representation. Her work is like a funhouse mirror held up to our art history—a mirror revealing the blind spots and biases we’d rather ignore.

Her works are time machines short-circuiting our certainties about progress and modernity. By juxtaposing historical references with contemporary concerns, she shows us that our current struggles with gender, power, and representation are merely the latest chapters of a much longer story.

Mockrin uses technical virtuosity not as an end in itself but as a tool to deconstruct and reimagine our visual heritage. She shows us that beauty can be a weapon of massive subversion when wielded with intelligence and precision.

Reference(s)

Jesse MOCKRIN (1981)
First name: Jesse
Last name: MOCKRIN
Gender: Female
Nationalitie(s):

  • United States of America

Age: 44 years old (2025)

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