Suburbia, 78” x 62”, 2025
I first met James Esber in 1991 when we both were visual arts fellows at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He and his wife—the painter Jane Fine—and I became fast friends and as it turned out, lifelong ones.
Back then I was immediately drawn to Esber’s work by the unfettered appropriation of images he took from mainstream media sources: history books, TV, newspapers, and magazines. From his perspective, these photos were ubiquitous in American culture and fodder for creating paintings that had an indirect yet palpable link to the Vietnam War. During the ’80s and well into the ’90s, many visual artists were grappling with the idea of what was considered original art—what images belonged to whom, what could be appropriated for use in one’s art, along with other such notions of authorship and provenance. Before the advent of Photoshop, artists were well along their way in hijacking imagery from media culture and inserting it into new, challenging, and often political works.
Born in Cleveland in 1961, Esber was too young to have been drafted into the war or to have had—until at least the ’70s—any cogent understanding of America’s murky rationale for being a participant in a far distant war in Southeast Asia. While older than Esber by a few years—and Canadian—I too experienced the Vietnam War through the osmosis of a child. Magazines like Time, Newsweek, and Life arrived weekly in my home, providing gory, unimaginable images of a war somewhere in Other-land, somewhere Not-Here, and mostly in color. The grainy black and white TV news footage my parents watched each night along with their indecipherable, ominous talk of “what was going on over there”—all of it seeped into me as a kind of dark reality that was incoherent but was felt and very much in the air I breathed.
In our many conversations over the years, Esber has said that watching TV as a young boy was deeply influential to his future as a painter of images that were grounded in the tangled memories of (mostly) TV iconography from the late ’60s onward.
The photo Saigon Execution (1968) by Eddie Adams is known to many. It captured the summary execution of a suspected Viet Cong captain by a South Vietnamese officer. Equally famous is the iconic work by Nick Ut of Napalm Girl (1972). Both photographs were instrumental factors in furthering middle-class America’s skepticism at being engaged in what was appearing to be an endless and pointless war. These and many other photos from Vietnam planted seeds of distrust in a populace that was growing weary and cynical toward a government that was feeding a war machine with American lives.
Esber’s massive Napalm painting, which spans sixteen feet across, was constructed in 1996 out of nylon hosiery, Lycra, psychedelic fabric, and acrylic paint. At that time and before he began using the computer for recycling found images, Esber was projecting photos (Kodachrome slides) onto nylon fabric, then painting the projected image, Ben-Day dots and all. The distortion that he effected—by pulling and stretching the nylon fabric so that the painted images became less legible while still recognizable—became a signature style in his subsequent work through the ’90s and beyond.
Napalm, 8’ x 16’, mixed media, 1996
Both Napalm Girl and Saigon Execution became the source for Esber’s travels into creating original paintings via reproduction, distortion, and wild, vivid embellishment. Esber’s stunning Napalm catches the viewer in an awkward position: The recycled image of the nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc triggers a recall of that horrific scene decades ago, while providing younger viewers—with little or no recollection of the photo—a point of reflection. The jarring ’60s fabric with its hallucinogenic neon colors, alongside droopy segments of nylon hosiery, is a counterpoint to the emotional weight of Kim Phuc’s terrified face. In both the Napalm and Execution (1993) paintings, to say that the colors and form are dislocating is an understatement. Because the original photos were black and white, Esber’s heightened palette of acid green, hot pink, and vibrant orange creates an unsettling memory jag.
Esber’s more recent work employs the use of AI to generate and regenerate images of subjects linked to combat and, in the wake of so many mass killings, America’s obsession with guns. Suburbia, Doll with Rifle, and Boy with Gun and Flowers all originate from a print-out of an AI calculation of whatever subject Esber feeds the computer. The image is then subjectively re-drawn with graphite on either paper, or painted on canvas or PVC panel. These newer paintings, while on a smaller scale than the ’90s works, continue to investigate the vitality and malleability of images that are both familiar and foreign to the eye.
The distortion motif in Esber’s body of work points to the idea of how an image such as Ut’s, Adams’s, and even Norman Rockwell’s gets filtered to viewers via memory by a mainstream media that can—depending on who controls its currency—deliver truth, deception, or some warped version of both.
—Mary Behrens, Visual Arts Editor
Execution II, 42” x 30”, 2009
Execution, 4’ x 9’, mixed media, 1993
Figure on Ground, 38” x 46”, 2013
Boy with Gun and Flowers, 17” x 14”, 2023
Doll with Rifle, 17” x 14”, 2023
Soldierboy, 75” x 103”, 2007
Toy Soldier, 14” x 17”, 2012
James Esber has shown his work in New York and beyond, including a twenty-five-year survey at the Clifford Gallery at Colgate University (2014) and a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (2011). He has had multiple one-person shows at PPOW, NYC, Bernard Toale in Boston, and Pierogi in both New York and Leipzig. He has also shown widely in group exhibitions, including ASKEW at DC Moore Gallery (2022), Flex at the Tang Museum (2020), Now What? at The Norton Museum of Art (2011), and SITE Santa Fe’s Fifth International Biennial: Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (2004). He lives in Brooklyn. Find him at jamesesber.com and on Instagram @jamesesber.
