Into the Storm with Robert Longo

The images come from the media, but here they lose speed. At the Pace Gallery Tokyo, Robert Longo removes them from the continuous flow of news and turns them into large-scale charcoal drawings, built slowly and with precision. Angels of the Maelstrom begins with this gesture: stopping what usually moves too fast, to understand what it holds. This is his first solo exhibition in Japan in more than three decades, and it is not a neutral return. In recent years, Longo has increasingly focused on images tied to political violence, protests and conflict. His sources are press photographs, online materials, fragments already saturated with meaning. The shift into drawing does not reproduce them but transforms them, restoring a density that immediate consumption tends to erase. The use of black and white is a decisive choice. It removes the spectacle of color and concentrates attention on light, shadow and structure. The images become almost sculptural, compact surfaces that demand time. In this slowing down, the core of Longo’s work emerges: not to represent reality, but to reveal how it is constructed and perceived. The title introduces a figure that runs through the exhibition. The angel invoked by Longo recalls Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, interpreted by Walter Benjamin as a being propelled into the future while facing the past. This becomes a key: the works are not static, but driven by a force that pushes them forward while holding onto what has already happened. Longo’s imagery moves across different registers. On one side, nature - crashing waves, animals, landscapes. On the other, recent history and American cultural icons. Figures such as John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley appear alongside symbolic elements, forming sequences where myth and news are no longer distinct. At the center stands Untitled (American Samurai), depicting Shohei Ohtani. It is not simply a portrait, but a point of tension between cultures. Ohtani becomes an image where identities, expectations and narratives overlap. Here Longo’s approach becomes clear: images are never neutral, they are always shaped by forces beyond them. Angels of the Maelstrom does not build a linear narrative. It accumulates, layers, connects. Drawing becomes a way to confront the excess of contemporary images, slowing time and restoring complexity to what elsewhere disappears in seconds.