As an undergraduate art student in a painting-conservation course he was taking abroad, Lyndon Barrois Jr. was told his problem was he was too good at copying.
“Too deceptive,” his instructor called Barrois’ brushstrokes when he mimicked a 14th-century Madonna and child. Painting conservators are supposed to vary their brushwork from that of the original, so it can be undone, if need be, rather than duplicate it precisely.
That was Barrois’ introduction to the echoes between conservation and art forgery. Combine that epiphany with his love for classic art-heist movies like “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “Topkapi” and you’ll glimpse the outlines of “Rosette,” Barrois’ new gallery-sized installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
“Rosette” illuminates the Pittsburgh-based artist’s partial, never-to-be-completed script for a film titled “Double Appear,” about a pair of conservators at a Belgian museum. Lumière is also a forger who’s critical of how imperial powers like Belgium have removed cultural treasures from colonies like the country now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She and Seon-Min, a new hire, discuss things like artistic frauds. “Would it really matter if the copy were a good one?” asks Lumière.
Forging ahead
“Rosette” includes both original artworks by the Carnegie Mellon University art professor and objects drawn from the collection of the museums of art and natural history. Visitors can roam the Forum Gallery, which is dominated by an arrangement of large red wooden art-packing crates surmounted by a taxidermy leopard.
The big cat overlooks an art-conservator’s worktable, complete with high-tech magnifying lenses, brushes, and half-finished paintings. On the walls are lobby cards for the fictive film, along with artworks that beckon to Congolese history: a rubber plant, a silkscreen of Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, and a relief portrait of Belgium’s infamous King Leopold II.
“Given that my main character … that drives the narrative is a forger — and again, kind of talking about that blurred line between the role of conservator and forger — I wanted elements from a conservation studio to be a part of the installation, and I'm OK if there's an ambiguity to how we identify the space,” Barrois said. “I'm happy if it goes back and forth between a conservation lab [and] a forger studio.”
Barrois is a native of New Orleans whose work has been exhibited in galleries around the U.S. and internationally. He said that for his protagonist, Lumière, “The main motivation for this heist or con is essentially an alternative proposition for restitution or the repatriation of wealth from a colonial empire to an area of the world that it has it has colonized.” She wants to fake Congolese artifacts so she can return the originals.
The exhibit arrives at a time when calls for museums to repatriate human remains and artifacts taken from their home communities.
The Carnegie Museum of Art has many items sourced from other cultures. Asked whether it had ever repatriated any artifacts, or whether it had a policy on repatriation, the museum issued this statement: “Carnegie Museum of Art has not previously repatriated collection objects, however, provenance research is ongoing for the entire collection, and the museum takes all claims for repatriation seriously.”
As for Barrois himself, “I'm conflicted about it,” he said. “I've had, like many people, amazing experiences of going to one vast, you know, vast encyclopedic museum and seeing things from all over the world. Right? But it's also kind of funny that, you know, you can go to a very large institution in Kansas City, for instance, and, you know, your only experience with India could be through, you know, their Asian art section. That's kind of crazy.”
Hiding in plain sight
Some of the artifacts on display in “Rosette,” like an elephant’s molar, are authentic. But, further developing the exhibit’s theme, some of the minerals are not — like a quartz crystal coated with gold fumes to change its color, and a crystal from the DRC that was glued to other minerals to look as though it had formed there.
The world of faked minerals was new to Barrois. “More often than not, they were donated by other collectors who'd been, you know, duped or swindled and sold things,” he said. “I really liked that in relation to things that I'm doing, right, in terms of like presenting the appearance of something that is actually something else.”
Each individual component of “Rosette” has its own symbolic resonances. Take that leopard. Barrois notes its significance in the DRC includes the decorative use of its skin, whose distinctive pattern gives the exhibit its name.
The fact that they provide camouflage is also relevant. “I like to think of it as a sort of metaphor for hiding in plain sight,” Barrois said. “The leopard, when sort of taken out of the context of the jungle, is very. It's hard to miss. Right? It's a bit of an ostentatious pattern, but at the same time, it's the pattern that allows it to sort of go undetected in its natural habitat, right in then under the trellises of the jungle.”
“It is a bit of a double agent in the show, right?” he added. “It's not good or bad, but it's something that occupies maybe both sides of an argument, perhaps.”
“Rosette” remains on display through Aug. 27. More information is here.
