A collection of Trompe L'Oeil paintings exploring the narrative of cultural rejection
THE TALE OF MR NOBODY (Acrylic on Board)
PARADISE LOST (support work )
Notes on "The Tale of Mr Nobody"
The trompe l’oeil "Tale of Mr Nobody" series describes the echoes of an action, a satirical narrative about rejection showing the classic marks so familiar to artists who are unsuccessful in open competitions.
These paintings are quiet monuments to the many failures we never see. As such, it makes us wonder about the nature of being judged.
Just as art has taken part-possession of our diminished religiosity, so its market structure retains in part old theocratic systems of judgement. We may easily imagine some of art's gatekeepers as a symbolic Holy See, their chalk marks of approbation or damnation mimicking the language of a new corporate Reformation, itself harking back to the "thumbing" Colosseum masters of Rome complete with similar symbols of anonomous judgement.
In visual terms, "The Tale of Mr Nobody" doesn’t materially express emotion as one might see in a contemporary abstract. There is no direct physical theatre and yet there are images of the torn, the wiped chalk and consequential finger marks of some invisible sufferer holding the work at arms length. This aesthetic self-effacement anchors itself to the religious tableaux’s of the past, a pre- El Greco picture plane where the story may be dramatic yet the ego consciously removed by invisible brushing. One could almost consider it a modern cultural relic .
"The Tale of Mr Nobody" is further complicated by the indeterminate place we may be viewing it. Hung as the “painting” we are in the room, never seeing "the back”. By our imagination we may escape into the timeless spectre on the other side, imagining the true artwork as a mediocre piece in a silent bedsit or a recently “discovered” masterpiece in a high class museum. This forces us to meditate on the undiscovered and transitory nature of cultural approval.
In further play, I made one study as a rotating “sculpture” called "Paradise Lost" With the two sides revealed.
Perhaps this series is not so much a quasi-Religious depiction of the art world but a Darwinian one.
These paintings are quiet monuments to the many failures we never see. As such, it makes us wonder about the nature of being judged.
Just as art has taken part-possession of our diminished religiosity, so its market structure retains in part old theocratic systems of judgement. We may easily imagine some of art's gatekeepers as a symbolic Holy See, their chalk marks of approbation or damnation mimicking the language of a new corporate Reformation, itself harking back to the "thumbing" Colosseum masters of Rome complete with similar symbols of anonomous judgement.
In visual terms, "The Tale of Mr Nobody" doesn’t materially express emotion as one might see in a contemporary abstract. There is no direct physical theatre and yet there are images of the torn, the wiped chalk and consequential finger marks of some invisible sufferer holding the work at arms length. This aesthetic self-effacement anchors itself to the religious tableaux’s of the past, a pre- El Greco picture plane where the story may be dramatic yet the ego consciously removed by invisible brushing. One could almost consider it a modern cultural relic .
"The Tale of Mr Nobody" is further complicated by the indeterminate place we may be viewing it. Hung as the “painting” we are in the room, never seeing "the back”. By our imagination we may escape into the timeless spectre on the other side, imagining the true artwork as a mediocre piece in a silent bedsit or a recently “discovered” masterpiece in a high class museum. This forces us to meditate on the undiscovered and transitory nature of cultural approval.
In further play, I made one study as a rotating “sculpture” called "Paradise Lost" With the two sides revealed.
Perhaps this series is not so much a quasi-Religious depiction of the art world but a Darwinian one.