A visit to Robert Longo’s SoHo studio comes with a warning: you might get covered in charcoal.

It’s a muggy Thursday morning in midsummer and the artist, 72, is dressed in his signature uniform of all black, coffee mug in hand. Longo has just arrived in the city from his home in East Hampton, where he spends much of his time, and he’ll head back out later that afternoon. 

The artist is in the final stretch of preparation for “The Weight of Hope,” his exhibition that opens Sept. 11. The show will be the largest mounted at Pace’s 25th Street New York flagship, encompassing all of the gallery’s exhibition spaces across several floors. It’s a continuation of Longo’s survey exhibition “The Acceleration of History” at the Milwaukee Art Museum, featuring works from the past decade of his career as well as new ones, and comes on the heels of his show at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, which closed at the end of August.

At first glance all of his drawings, massive in scale, look like photographs. But Longo’s work is less about depicting a concrete moment and more about documenting a poetic truth. 

A large charcoal drawing of a tractor, almost finished — the final piece for the Pace exhibition — hangs in Longo’s main studio space alongside other works waiting to be shipped out, framed and mounted behind panels of Plexiglass. But for now, there’s no filter between the velvety-ness of the charcoal and the viewer. 

“Untitled (American Gothic)” was inspired by Longo’s drives out East, during which he often passes farm equipment parked alongside the road. The flipside to all of the farmstands and picture-perfect fresh produce is how they got there. And in Longo’s image, the subtext is the absent laborer.

“I saw this one shitty tractor, and then I had this dream about this image,” says the artist, seated in the middle of his studio. “I wanted to have this feeling of this guy who just goes, ‘f–k this, I don’t wanna do this anymore’. You know, ‘take this job and shove it, I quit.’” He then adds, “This is a totally fake picture.”

It’s a fake in the sense that it doesn’t depict a scene that existed beyond its own composition. Longo is known for his photorealistic paintings and drawings, but many of his works are an amalgamation of images real, imagined, and tweaked. But does something have to be real to be true?

He utilized AI, that bogeyman of creative industries, to help him depict the exact ground texture he wanted. From there, he translated the image composition onto paper with charcoal, “which is the most primitive medium,” he says. “The thing is, when they find out they’re charcoal drawings, people tend to look at things longer.”

Also in the studio: a drawing of a jellyfish, a plastic trash bag filled with cans, and a burning house that pays homage to Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline.

“I think art is about sharing. I want to share this with you, I also want you to see how I see it,” says Longo. Although sometimes the work will get “completely misread,” he describes his recent exhibitions as successful in terms of the viewer response. “Because I think they felt my anger about what was going on,” he adds.

Longo describes his approach to composition as a “map for the viewer of how to see a picture. I love the democracy of art, the fact that it’s different than a book or a movie where you have to kind of see it from the beginning.”

But Longo also disrupts the idea of typical film-watching chronology. On Pace’s top floor, three of his art films will play in rotation on a long white wall of the gallery that faces the room’s sweeping window and step seating. Longo describes the floor as “tranquil,” but the tranquility is cut by an underlying sense of unease. 

“Untitled (Image Storm)” features a cascade of photos in quick succession, from events between July 4, 2024, and Sept. 9, 2024, and every so often the screen will randomly freeze on one of the images. Another video, “Untitled (Sea of Change, An Homage to Winslow Homer)”, features oceanic waves filmed at various Long Island beaches over the course of a day, slowed down, shown in tandem with a soundtrack of collapsing buildings and bombs. The third video, “Icarus Rising,” features close-ups of news photos being slowly ripped.

“Ironically what ends up happening is moving images seem more soothing and to me, sometimes the [still] images are more disruptive than a moving image. Even the image storm, which is over 10,000 images, almost a hundred frames per second. It’s more calming to me than some of these drawings.”

While Longo’s work brings specific imagery into focus, it exists at a time when people are being constantly barraged with them, both mundane and devastating, on social media and online. In the same scroll, you can be confronted by images of life’s mundane ephemera and others of war and suffering. Longo’s work is similarly an invitation to reflect on the intersection of art and catastrophe, the beautiful and the horrific. Works in the exhibition include the bullet-pierced window displays of a dress boutique in Ukraine; a portrait of Iranian activist Mahsa Amini, whose death sparked mass protests, and other scenes from the protests that have defined the past decade. And there are waves: the beautiful oceanic arcs that captivate surfers, and the perilous water landscape that underscores the dangerous journeys of migrant refugees across the Mediterranean Sea.

“Julian Barnes wrote this great essay about ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, and there was a whole idea, how do you make art out of catastrophe?  Like how did he, [Théodore] Géricault, paint the ‘Raft of Medusa,’ how do you paint this incredibly beautiful [artwork]?” says Longo. Géricault’s monumental painting depicts the tragic aftermath of the 1816 shipwreck of a French frigate, overseen by an incompetent captain; many onboard the ship were put on a hastily built raft, and few survived. 

“Every time I go to Paris, that’s why I go see that painting. That’s one of the most important paintings I’ve ever seen.”

In a separate office down the hall from the studio, a scaled model of the exhibition space is laid out with the miniature works installed on the walls. The show will also feature several sculptures, including a stack of newspapers that measures one year of the pandemic. The scaled model provides an unusual perspective to take in the larger-than-life works: while it invites prolonged observation and intimacy, the birds-eye view almost underscores how difficult it is for a visitor to take in and feel so much all at once.

The lead image for the Pace exhibition is “Untitled (Ascending Flag),” an American flag concave with gravity but underscoring the beauty of how the light hits the rippling fabric, the stars and stripes partially obscured in the undulations. The image, part of his “Protocol Verso” series, calls to mind Longo’s depictions of oceanic waves. 

To put it mildly, Longo is disheartened by the political climate, by the bullying and attacks on democracy, by war, by the language that renders America as a sports team. “ It keeps us in this constant state of war,” says Longo, who launched his art career during the Reagan administration. “It’s always us against them.” 

He plans to wrap Pace’s exterior in Chelsea with an image of the American Constitution, informed in part by Marshall McLuhan, the early media and technology theorist. McLuhan illustrated the consuming impact of mass media using Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Descent Into the Maelström” as a metaphor. Longo read the story about three brothers, a boat, and a storm’s powerful vortex, and felt like it was also a tale about the current political moment. The brother that made it out of the storm, “just held on, tried to get through it, and he survived,” says Longo. “So I kind of feel like that’s what we’re doing.”

Most people do eventually get their sea legs. Which loops attention back to the title of the show: hope. 

“ St. Augustine said that ‘Hope has two daughters’ — rage and courage. So then I went and looked it up and what his intention was,” says Longo. “Rage is the anger about what is happening; courage is the insight to change it. I know a lot of hopeful people.”