I imagine Leon Golub would feel ambivalent about the acclaim his paintings have been afforded in recent years. It’s great to see his work getting shown at blue-chip institutions and gaining international esteem, but its recent prominence proves that his monumental tableaux of state violence are more than mere fantasies. The latest Golub resurgence at Hauser & Wirth this past September and October proved resoundingly that his marriage of uncompromising naturalism to militaristic subject matter holds more water than its contemporary emulators. “Et In Arcadia Ego,” conceived by Chicago native son Rashid Johnson, fills two floors of H&W’s five-story Chelsea edifice: floor two holds a museum-style gathering of a number of works operating in a parallel thematic mode as Golub, while the crown jewels—Golub’s enormous oil on linen paintings depicting veiny deliverymen of violence—are housed on floor five.

        Johnson’s floor two selections make for insightful comparison with Golub’s paintings but ultimately seem to be mere counterfactuals on his journey to creating such masterworks. Golub could have captured the imperious aura exuded by state police forces like Robert Longo did in his characteristically stylized Portland Riot Cops or retreated into the tumultuous interiority of artists like Philip Guston (visible in his lumpy abstraction Group II) and Johnson himself (represented by the uptight Anxious Mask). But Golub’s eye was objective, not prone to the emotional evocations of others concerned with the perils of being a state subject. He portrayed violence not as some invisible, insidious menace but as a concrete force which can be doled out in precise quantities to achieve precise ends. (Golub would know—he served in the army in the late 1940s.) The upshot is as arresting as it is stomach-churning.

        Six of Golub’s paintings are on view on the fifth floor, spanning five decades of his career. His 1958 portrait Philosopher IV evinces an early-career interest in art brut with its caricatured features and dusty, Dubuffet-esque color palette. But whatever fantasies Dubuffet harbored about the ability of art to convey the human experience were knocked out of Golub with the onset of the Vietnam War. There are no words for a painting like 1969’s Napalm III. Two writhing figures—one lying, one standing—claw at their featureless faces, the skin completely melted off their bodies. Golub’s new choice of medium—linen rather than canvas—is uncomfortably skinlike, sagging like a poorly hung quilt. But his unemotional rendering of the subject leaves nothing up for interpretation—he refuses to take a side. Appealing to emotion is a tired gambit to Golub, who contents himself with making a matter of fact assertion: “Men are being stripped of their skin. Do with that whatever you’d like.”

        Golub grappled with insecurity in the 1970s, destroying a number of his earlier paintings before settling into a series of abject portraits. His subjects (as in Vietnamese Woman I on the second floor) look like they’re made of coarse sandpaper, a quality which owes itself to Golub’s meticulous layering and scraping away of paint. We can all thank our lucky stars he decided to go big with the new technique, applying it on monumental sheets of linen in the early 1980s. In the paintings which ensued, Golub achieved the vividness that would come to characterize his work for decades: sinewy, rumpled figures against monochrome backgrounds, all either inflicting or enduring some sort of visceral harm.

        Golub recognized a shift in the tenor of American foreign policy with these new paintings. When large-scale offensives and troop maneuvers fell to impromptu ambushes in Vietnam, high-ups resorted to funding anticommunist paramilitary groups with tactics not unlike those of the Viet Cong: Salvadoran death squads, Afghan mujahideen, Nicaraguan Contras. But Golub doesn’t take a long view, focusing instead on individual acts of terror—beatings, executions, and the like—which could (and, in many cases, did) accumulate into world-shaking coups d’etat.

        Mercenaries IV depicts five such hellraisers against a blood-red background, all screaming or gesturing meaninglessly. Their features are remarkably individualized, allowing viewers to see a bit of themselves in each figure. “You can be on one side or the other,” noted Golub. “You can be on the ground as a victim, or you can be the guy holding the gun to the victim’s head. Given the circumstances, any of us could play different roles.” An uneasy but undeniable fact. We might not like it, but we’re made of the same flesh and bones and susceptible to the same frivolous desires as these madmen and sufferers.

        Golub made a name churning out bleak microcosms of power and masculinity, control and coercion. He says it best: “There are consequences we are sorry about. Still we must kill more. That’s the way it goes. A struggle for dominance and who gets to be on top, who reaps the rewards.” They’re everything and they’re nothing, bundled into one grotesque ball for our viewing pleasure.

Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.