Between Two Presences - Robert Lohman, c. 1980

In Between Two Presences, Robert Lohman organizes the composition around an unequal triad. Two expansive abstract faces dominate the upper half of the sheet, while a much smaller figure occupies the compressed space between and below them. This imbalance of scale establishes the work’s emotional structure before any specific narrative can be assigned to it. The larger figures possess visual authority; the central figure appears contained within their shared field.

The face at the upper left is broad, rounded, and inwardly directed. Its eye appears closed or lowered, giving it an introspective quality. The descending nose, curved mouth, and heavy gray modeling produce an expression that feels contemplative, protective, or sorrowful. Lohman does not outline this head as a single continuous form. Instead, it is assembled from several overlapping contours, as though the face is simultaneously turning, remembering, and withdrawing.

The upper-right figure is more angular and outwardly expressive. Its profile points toward the center, with a sharply defined nose and lips that appear slightly pursed. These lips could suggest speech, confrontation, breath, or affection. The surrounding lines extend outward in sweeping arcs, giving the face a sense of movement that contrasts with the more withdrawn presence on the left.

Together, the two large heads create a psychological enclosure. Their profiles lean toward the central area from opposite directions, producing a space that is intimate but also constricted. The smaller figure seems protected between them, yet it may equally be trapped beneath their emotional weight. Lohman permits both readings to remain active.

The central figure is difficult to separate from the surrounding forms. Its small head appears near the lower middle, while pale, petal-like contours gather around it. The uncertainty is important. Rather than clearly illustrating three independent people, Lohman shows identities being formed through contact and overlap.

This central figure provides the composition’s emotional anchor. The larger faces may be understood as parental figures, lovers, companions, memories, or projections of the central person’s own divided consciousness. Because Lohman supplies no narrative accessories or recognizable setting, the drawing remains open to several interpretations.

One possibility is that the scene represents a person suspended between two opposing influences. The downward-looking face on the left may embody restraint, grief, or interior reflection, while the profile on the right conveys desire, urgency, or external engagement. The central figure would then occupy the unstable territory between withdrawal and connection.

The composition may also be read as an image of memory. The large faces do not seem to occupy conventional physical space. They loom above and around the central figure like enlarged recollections whose emotional importance has altered their scale. Lohman frequently used distortion to express psychological rather than optical reality, and here the disproportionate heads may indicate the overwhelming presence that remembered individuals retain within the mind.

The interaction between the upper figures also contains a possible erotic or affectionate charge. The right-hand profile leans inward with lips extended, while the left-hand figure appears to lower its face toward the same central region. Yet Lohman prevents the image from becoming a straightforward depiction of romantic intimacy. The bodies do not meet naturally, and the central figure complicates any simple exchange between the two larger heads.

This ambiguity gives the work emotional richness. It could depict affection shared among several figures, a person caught between two relationships, or an internal self surrounded by competing forms of attachment. Tenderness and pressure coexist within the same visual structure.

Lohman reinforces this complexity through the fluidity of his line. Bold contours establish the principal faces, but thinner lines pass through and across them, refusing to respect anatomical boundaries. A cheek becomes part of another head; a neck passes into a shoulder or arm; a dark shape may function simultaneously as hair, clothing, and negative space.

The gray washes are similarly unstable. Some follow the curves of recognizable facial forms, while others behave more abstractly, gathering into broad masses that hold the composition together. Lohman alternates between translucent and opaque passages, creating the sense that some presences are more substantial while others are fading, emerging, or remembered.

The absence of a background is also significant. Unlike Figures in a Divided Interior, which places its occupants within a patterned domestic environment, Between Two Presences offers no room, furniture, or architectural framework. The figures exist in an open psychological field. Nothing distracts from their emotional and formal entanglement.

This isolation separates the work from Lohman’s political black-and-white series of the early 1970s. In Surveillance and Watchers, multiplied eyes, listening forms, directional signals, and mechanical ambiguities communicate anxiety about monitoring and institutional control. Although Between Two Presences shares the restricted palette and fragmented anatomy of those works, its emotional concerns appear more private.

Here, the distortion does not suggest that the figures are watching one another. Several eyes are closed, lowered, or only minimally defined. The composition is governed less by vigilance than by touch, nearness, and psychological dependence. Its tension arises not from an unseen state apparatus but from the difficulty of maintaining an individual identity within close relationships.

The work therefore demonstrates how Lohman could employ a similar formal vocabulary—fragmented profiles, exaggerated scale, overlapping bodies, and monochromatic washes—to address substantially different subjects. The same distortions that convey paranoia in one context can communicate intimacy, memory, or emotional conflict in another.

Lohman’s sculptural instincts remain visible throughout the drawing. The figures are built from broad masses and carved contours rather than delicate modeling. The large heads feel almost like relief sculptures pressed into the shallow surface of the paper. Their rounded volumes overlap and interlock, while the smaller central figure functions almost as a joint connecting the larger forms.

This method reflects Lohman’s broader practice across drawing, painting, ceramics, and sculpture. He repeatedly treated the body as a flexible expressive structure rather than a fixed anatomical fact. A face could be stretched to communicate longing, divided to suggest conflict, or compressed against another body to convey dependence.

The two large faces in Between Two Presences are not individualized portraits in the traditional sense. Their features are too abstracted and structurally manipulated to provide straightforward likenesses. Yet they possess distinct emotional identities. The left presence feels inward, heavy, and reflective; the right feels active, direct, and reaching. Lohman differentiates them through gesture and shape rather than naturalistic detail.

The small central figure introduces a third emotional register. Its diminutive scale suggests youth, vulnerability, dependence, or a self made small by the influence of others. Yet its central placement also gives it structural importance. The entire composition bends around this figure. The two larger presences may dominate visually, but their relationship is defined by the person between them.

The painting examines the porous boundary between individual identity and emotional attachment. Lohman presents the self not as an isolated, stable form but as something shaped by proximity, memory, and the influence of others. The central figure is protected and threatened by the same surrounding forms, making Between Two Presences a compelling study of intimacy as both refuge and pressure.