Damaged Romanticism, the exhibition now on view at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery, offers an insightful look at artists who address the tragedies of modern life in moving and often beautiful ways. There isn’t an emphasis on any one medium or methodology; the show includes everything from painting, sculpture and installation to video, film and photography. Rather, the fifteen internationally recognized artists meet around a shared recognition of beauty and constructive emotion in the face of adversity. Melding the emotionality of romanticism with the level-headedness of realism, the works often dabble in the fantastic or the surreal while remaining firmly grounded in the problems of the here and now. Identity crises, industrial decay and natural and environmental disjunctures are but a few of the themes present.

A damaged romanticism is one, as the show’s placard states, where “stubborn optimism takes the place of dreamy utopianism.” Romanticism is damaged when ideals lose their footing and emotional fervor can no longer hide the dingy or depressing truth of reality. Rather than simply accepting that reality and sliding into a static realism, however, this romanticism retains some measure of the romantic spirit, using the disappointment of failure as a building block for future action. Not all of the works fit comfortably together, but each of them does address this sense of real-time emotion and imagination.

Out of all the works, Jesper Just’s film It Will All End in Tears (2006) and Julia Oschatz’s series of landscape drawings are the two that most closely approach the feel of traditional Romanticism. Beautiful, rich and evocative, Just’s film is a twenty-minute epic that shifts, twists and meanders its way through a plot that is as ambiguous as it is moving. The tight, cinematic composition of the scenes and the high production value of the film create a dark intimacy that allows one to emotionally communicate with the psychological trials of his characters. In this way, Just hits on one of the most essential aspects of Romanticism—its emotional currency—without falling prey to its grandiose idealism. The unsettling ambiguity draws us back to a reality where answers are never easy to come by.

Julia Oschatz’s series of drawings take their cue from traditional Romantic landscape painting but interject a healthy dose of quirky self-awareness to pull them back to reality. Each drawing features a strange, vaguely mouse-headed character named Wesen (German for “being” or “essence”) in a vast, overwhelmingly gray landscape. Wesen, always miniscule next to towering trees and craggy mountains, stands in for the romantic anxieties and sublime terrors of man’s insignificance in nature. However, as an awkward half-human, half animal hybrid with no eyes, the effect is almost comical as he apparently contemplates the transcendent landscape before him.

Edward Burtynsky’s stunning photographs of a shipbreaking yard in Bangladesh take a more realistic tack, offering a poignant meditation on human industry and nature. Shipbreaking, which primarily occurs in developing south Asian countries, is the dangerous and toxic practice of dismantling old industrial ships for scrap metal. Burtynsky’s sweeping views show us a graveyard of giant ship carcasses. These carcasses stand in surreal disjunction against the vast expanse of the beaches and the miniscule people dotting the shoreline. Burtynsky’s aesthetically charged documentary style allows for a powerful though tragic beauty, which nicely underscores the show’s theme and wonderfully illustrates what the organizers refer to as an “aftermath aesthetic.”

Florian Maier-Aichen’s photographs of subtly dreamlike landscapes also take up this “aftermath aesthetic.” Mixing analogue photography with digital editing techniques, Maier-Aichen subverts the documentary nature of photography by tweaking the images in unexpected ways. In Untitled (Long Beach) (2004), for instance, he has placed a row of ice-covered mountains on the horizon. A black and white aerial view, this otherwise normal image of a city and its suburban sprawl turns into an ashen, post-apocalyptic desert scene.

Many of the works in the show suggest that beauty can be found in nearly anything. None, however, put it in such luxurious or splendid terms as Angelo Filomeno. Working with materials like silk lamé, crystals, diamond and 18k gold, Filomeno’s painstaking, beautiful embroideries show the not-so cuddly side of animal life. This is ticklishly apparent in his Arcanum: Rolling Shit (2006), which features an exquisitely rendered dung beetle rolling a decorative bit of poop.

Finding beauty in the tragic and the ugly is certainly a major thread that runs throughout the show. Though the organizers emphasize hope and optimism as a uniting characteristic, the significance of this damaged romanticism is something more subtle. It is this stimulating mix of emotionality and disillusionment—a mix that bridges the gap between the romantic and the realistic. None of the works give easy answers and none of them offer a security blanket, but they don’t leave you feeling despondent either. The artists certainly recognize a light at then end of the tunnel, but they are also aware that we have to crawl through the sludge and grime of the tunnel itself to reach its brighter end. By forging a connection between sentimentality and cynicism, the works in this highly successful show offer the best of both worlds.

Allison Myers is pursuing an M.A. in art history at The University of Texas at Austin.