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The Depraved, Sublime Art of 'True Detective'

Ani Bezzerides says, "I don't really get art," but showrunner Nic Pizzolatto does.
HBO/Lacey Terrell

This post contains spoilers for Season 2 of True Detective.

Before Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) dives heels-first into the seedy sex party of last night's True Detective, "Church in Ruins," (Episode 6), her sister Athena (Leven Rambin) tries to dissuade her from going. "I made that for you," Athena says, voice crackling with emotion as she gestures to a painting. "I was thinking about a woman drowning on dry land." In her typical gruffness, Bezzerides quips back, "I don't really get art."

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Lucky for us, showrunner Nic Pizzolatto and production designer Alex DiGerlando do. Among the cornucopia of artworks dressing the sex mansions and suburban households of Pizzolatto's dark vision of LA, Athena's painting was commissioned from Brooklyn artist William Logan, who describes his work as "[sitting] somewhere right between abstraction and representation." Working with DiGerlando and Oscar-winning set designer Karen O'Hara, Logan captured the "woman drowning on dry land" that seems an apt description of McAdams' lonely, combative portrayal of the fraught Bezzerides.

Athena Mute (2015), William Logan

"The piece is based on a drawing I did in the Met of the Statue of Sappho, by Comte Prosper d’Epinay, an amazing statue by that has always gripped me for its subtle descriptions of despair and piercing rendering of passion," Logan tells The Creators Project. He admits to only being caught up on episode two of True Detective himself, but thorough conversation with the art department led him to a good fit. "It does seem like Sappho could be said to be drowning under the weight of her inner emotions in this statue. She was a very sensitive poet from antiquity, and perhaps Athena is implying that by repressing her emotions, Antigone is drowning herself, just like her mother." Sounds about right to us.

This wasn't the first time DiGerlando and Pizzolatto have used art to help flesh out their characters. Just as Rust Cohle's spartan apartment spoke to his one-track mind, and Marty Hart's suburban paradise pegged his traditionalist values in Season 1, DiGerlando's work as production designer tells us a lot about the characters, from the depraved remains of Caspere's sex parties, to the hand-carved totems that spark Ani and Athena's memories of their deceased mother. Those totems, for example, are works by Josh Walsh, the the same artist who made the wooden teepees sprinkled throughout the first season. "That wasn't something we were just going to find as-written," DiGerlando tells The Creators Project. Art and overtones of sexual depravity, it seems, are the only actual connections fans will get between the two worlds.

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Immaculate Reflection, 2006, Terry Rodgers. HBO/Lacey Terrell

The two ideas meet in spades throughout City Manager Caspere's extensive explicit art collection. "Nic wanted to establish Caspere as a fetishistic character who objectified women and sort of put them on a pedestal of perverted tendencies. But he didn't want anything grotesque or particularly violent with the sex," DiGerlando explains. Terry Rogers, a painter who specializes in character art and body politics, immediately sprang to DiGerlando's mind as he read the script. "We poured through his books and figured out which ones felt most right for Caspere. We decided we were going to go for things that had an ominous and eerie vibe, without going outright disturbing."

For the story of real 'True Detectives' Stuart Murphy and Tom Tedder, watch below:

Two of Rodgers' large canvases, Immaculate Reflection (2006) and Stealing Scenes (2006) made it onto the set, alongside Peter Sarkisian's video sculpture White Water (1999), work from soft porn comic book illustrator and Fellini collaborator Milo Manara, and paintings by Melissa Mailer-Yates.

Sexually expressive works like these are foiled by a crowned skeleton sculpture, created by LA artist Deb Jones. "We were looking at the guilded skeletons of saints from Europe, looking at that sort of high opulence with the Mexican kitsch of Santa Muerte to create our own kind of hybrid," DiGerlando says. "At that point in the story it was all about trying to point out the weird off-kilter culture of LA spiritualism. This is True Detective, and this creepy occult stuff always lingers in the background of the show."

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'White Water' (1999), Peter Sarkisian. "Nic didn't know who the artist was, or where exactly he had seen it. For a while we thought he had been dreaming. We spent months looking for that thing."

Mayor Chessani is obviously not the man of refined taste that we see in Caspere, but his Bel-Air home is chock full of hilariously (intentionally) tacky works. From mayoral portraits of the Chessani patriarchy that has been ruling Vinci for generations, painted by staff artist Andrea Dopaso, to Photoshopped images of Chessani shaking hands with George W. Bush, there's a lot to love in the palatial mansion. DiGerlando, however, has one favorite piece in particular: the life-sized cutout of Mrs. Chessani standing in the mayor's study.

The best thing about the cutout is that she's inspired by real life, and acts as one more thread between the two seasons. DiGerlando recounts, "When we were doing Season 1, we shot in this mansion for the Tuttle estate, the one that Rust Cohle sneaks in and finds the tape in a safe. And in the actual location, when we were scouting that, we walked in with the guy whose house it was, and in his office was a cardboard cutout of his wife, who was a pop star in Russia. So when we were doing the Chessani mansion I was like, 'Can we do that?' And Nic said yes."

HBO/Lacey Terrell

So, from a production design perspective, what's important in the world of True Detective? Sex, art, and cutouts—any connection to Ben Caspere's eyes? You be the detective.

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HBO's True Detective Season 2, Episode 7 "Black Maps and Motel Rooms" premieres August 2 at 9 PM.

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