Narrative Games on the Cubist Plane
This Cubist series was essentially a series of playful experiments around the idea of distinct social narratives within a mannerist picture plane. The explanation is perhaps rather more intense than the works themselves but the underlying themes I described and my desire to explore them are no less so.
These paintings came out of my interest in how expressive surfaces have become not only man’s unchallenged interpretation of divine will but the divine itself. The consequential modernist emptying of content is well known, but the question is what to put back?
We have only partially recovered from this nihilism by creating a type of imagery whose key components are in the main, mannerist. Most successful Contemporary Art has become, as Edward de Bono once said of the universally popular; Beautiful, Powerful and Meaningless. The shared consensus is that this is enough and yet mere aesthesis, bloated idiosyncrasy or empty social revisionism contradicts not only to the modern art debate but very the idea of "progressive" intelligence upon which Western Cultures have (albeit tenuously and with intermediate disasters) been built.
Looked at from the perspective of "social use", Post Modern Art is not the independent beacon of freedom that nourishes a wider public but is interwoven with advanced consumer capitalism which ultimately comforts only itself. This self-possession may have a historical continuity with static imperial cultures throughout time but not the free loving plurality it claims to champion. By this I mean that artistic success seems to require as much the skills in understanding and complying to the monetizing surveillance of complex computer algorithms or becoming a project manager to apply for the corporate financing of time-based projects bent in the main on the sponsor's propaganda. Any art that is relatively permanent or tech-free or of a human scale or possessing manual dexterity has become in many quarters a bygone anathema. In other words, art is becoming de-historicized grand theatre. To extend an earlier point, any civilisations from Rome to Russia that have done this before have always rapidly declined.
With this is mind I decided to play with a intentionally “old school” decorative cubist picture planes, starting off with the simple decoration then allusions to the sea (in the works Four Up) but with the added twist that the various paintings could be interlinked in any order, thus making a rather tenuous satire on the notion of “consumer choice” as if the artist’s expression was not enough and could only be fulfilled by the buyer.
I then extended the flat cubist planes into a type of theatrical space (The Artist’s House) and then incorporated specific narrative ideas where “realism” and “the plastic” jostle on an uncertain picture plane. This is a more abstracted tangent to the same interests I had in the Geisha series. In the making of Plans for Simon and The House We Live In I was not holding to a specific composition from the start but a general theme, the former an absurd article of Cryogenic freezing, the latter about the huge social difference and life experience between a third world rubbish picker and an Astronaut.
In both (and with reference to the introduction) I wanted to present a typical (and rather satirical) Post-Modern space and yet incorporate ideas about social inequality, about environmental degradation, both subjects at odds with the light and small nature of the paintings or indeed polite contemporary art itself! This last Rhetoric (in justifying my small scale and going back to the artist as God) could seal my intent but if I'm honest, they really do belong as larger works to carry the subject matter and yet (in keeping with the experimental nature of this series) these are images who general approach I wish to explore in other subjects and pictorial ways.
These paintings came out of my interest in how expressive surfaces have become not only man’s unchallenged interpretation of divine will but the divine itself. The consequential modernist emptying of content is well known, but the question is what to put back?
We have only partially recovered from this nihilism by creating a type of imagery whose key components are in the main, mannerist. Most successful Contemporary Art has become, as Edward de Bono once said of the universally popular; Beautiful, Powerful and Meaningless. The shared consensus is that this is enough and yet mere aesthesis, bloated idiosyncrasy or empty social revisionism contradicts not only to the modern art debate but very the idea of "progressive" intelligence upon which Western Cultures have (albeit tenuously and with intermediate disasters) been built.
Looked at from the perspective of "social use", Post Modern Art is not the independent beacon of freedom that nourishes a wider public but is interwoven with advanced consumer capitalism which ultimately comforts only itself. This self-possession may have a historical continuity with static imperial cultures throughout time but not the free loving plurality it claims to champion. By this I mean that artistic success seems to require as much the skills in understanding and complying to the monetizing surveillance of complex computer algorithms or becoming a project manager to apply for the corporate financing of time-based projects bent in the main on the sponsor's propaganda. Any art that is relatively permanent or tech-free or of a human scale or possessing manual dexterity has become in many quarters a bygone anathema. In other words, art is becoming de-historicized grand theatre. To extend an earlier point, any civilisations from Rome to Russia that have done this before have always rapidly declined.
With this is mind I decided to play with a intentionally “old school” decorative cubist picture planes, starting off with the simple decoration then allusions to the sea (in the works Four Up) but with the added twist that the various paintings could be interlinked in any order, thus making a rather tenuous satire on the notion of “consumer choice” as if the artist’s expression was not enough and could only be fulfilled by the buyer.
I then extended the flat cubist planes into a type of theatrical space (The Artist’s House) and then incorporated specific narrative ideas where “realism” and “the plastic” jostle on an uncertain picture plane. This is a more abstracted tangent to the same interests I had in the Geisha series. In the making of Plans for Simon and The House We Live In I was not holding to a specific composition from the start but a general theme, the former an absurd article of Cryogenic freezing, the latter about the huge social difference and life experience between a third world rubbish picker and an Astronaut.
In both (and with reference to the introduction) I wanted to present a typical (and rather satirical) Post-Modern space and yet incorporate ideas about social inequality, about environmental degradation, both subjects at odds with the light and small nature of the paintings or indeed polite contemporary art itself! This last Rhetoric (in justifying my small scale and going back to the artist as God) could seal my intent but if I'm honest, they really do belong as larger works to carry the subject matter and yet (in keeping with the experimental nature of this series) these are images who general approach I wish to explore in other subjects and pictorial ways.