Yuting Wang
Dexter Dalwood
Painter’s Painter was an exhibition just for painting, which I visited in Saatchi Gallery in March 2017. One of the artists from the show Dexter Dalwood showed five of his massive paintings. His work is rich with citations, imaginary spaces of infamous sites from literary works, important political place or locations of the tragic accidental deaths of celebrities, with conscious references to masterpieces, pop-culture, and other contemporary paintings. Using collage as a montage method to present his figureless places.
I found the most compelling thing in his work was the way he treated collage in a painterly fashion. He makes the collage first, and then makes a painting from it, keeping the style of the collage. This assembly of collage refers to different types of information, chosen at random, making the links between them irrelevant. This becomes a riddle that the audience needs to bring together through imagination and certain knowledge. Kurt Cobain’s Greenhouse combines collaged flower images and a city silhouette with painterly quotations. The chair beside the window doesn’t have a shadow, enhancing the feeling of isolation and desperation, but once you know who Kurt Cobain is, you will understand him staring outside the window experiencing this disillusionment.
The large scale of the work also underscored the dreamlike feeling of his painting. His painting is not for the aesthetic purpose but for creating emotional seduction. We feel invited into these spaces. In Bay of Pigs, the cross section of the water is a flat and massive thin layer, which gives people the sense of immersion.
Simultaneously, multicomponent collaged trees and bushes are depicted by bad rough brushstrokes, which convey an unreality. Such contrasting conflict we can
David Salle
He is a leader of American post-modern painting, who’s work are reckless and random in their borrowing of masterpieces, advertisements, magazines. He does not create new images rather he collages irrelevant images in a distinct manner to make paintings. His paintings enlist a space, with many motifs floating. People feel paradox and no clue to interpretation.
He even uses separate panels of canvas, juxtaposing and insetting them together. Using line and ungainly brushstrokes, he does not do fine painting. He distinguishes form Dexter Dalwood, who still hidden the clue beneath the surface. But Salle’s work is full of images, but nothing is connected, which reflect the image-dominated world nowadays. Mr Lucky puts the angel picture with a plate of fish, Mingus in Mexico montages the feigner of traditional painting with a monochrome of a woman drinking, a corner of fabric and some graffiti like chairs, such as a post-modernist way to create a work full of odd feelings.
The sensitivity of the images, their transplantation, and the way they are layered, their colour composition of all his paintings are the main factors that contribute to why his works are so compelling. Especially the contradictions. His paintings are full of image but are not narrative, using realistic imagery but conveying abstract information. He always collects, repeats and imitates, but never copy. The images in his work are even more powerful than the original images.
Anselm Kiefer
Keifer ‘s new solo exhibition Walhalla held in the White Cube Gallery expressed the ruined land after war as a paradise that refers to the neo-classical monument as an ironic metaphor. His work included numerous large paintings, installations and sculpture that employed many symbolic motifs and elements. References linked with postwar, German history and poetry and North European myths. The wild arrangement of media as is usual in his work, manifested the complexity of his ideas. But this time, the lead as a signature substance in his work was utilized more heavily, the whole corridor wall being covered by lead panels and almost all the sculptures were made from lead.
For now I will analyze his paintings. Three paintings depicted his own concrete sculptures, representing the monumental architecture ‘Walhalla’. The unending space meant that the audience could not view the entire painting at once. Dynamic composition reinforced the sense of the intensity and instability of a postwar landscape. The piled up dense layers and peeling surfaces of his paintings give the viewers a touchable visual experience, which literally suggests the visualized imagery of the desolate landscapes. His painting methodology with the subject of his work matched each other very well.
Keifer’s painting is strong and distinct. Recurrent images such as smocks, endless land, relics, poppys, and the way he create works, all of them point to the same topic—cataclysm. It is overwhelming, theatrical and spectacular. The media
also see in The Deluge. Raindrops and a big wave, are painted in the foreground very delicately, cartoon like. But the use of coarse brushstrokes to depict a little piece of land with a house in the bottom of the right corner looks fragile and twisted.
In Bay of Pigs beneath the water there is the icon that refers to Picasso’s work. Like in Grosvenor Square, there is a reference from Georg Baselitz. The freedom and flexibility to use many references brings his paintings more interpretations.
itself as a language also conveyed the same emotion; like lead, is deadly gray, has a transformative chemical feature. Kiefer once said that lead ‘is the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history’. From material to form, every element he considers is about how to strengthen emphasis of the power of his emotion. That is an important point for me to learn.
Ragnar Kjartansson
This artists practice is versatile, his work has a big range, from video, performance, painting, drawing and singing. Last summer holiday, I visited his solo exhibition in the Barbican Centre. The main work was an excellent performative video work, named Visitor. Eight screens play different musicals perform the same song. Depending on people’s random movement patterns, the audience will have a different experience. I want specifically to talk about the images in his video work.
In God, the video records a band repeating a pitch again and again as a loop. The whole bands performed in front of a fresh and shiny pink curtain screen. Separated into different steps, all the members wore black suits, and the instruments were shiny too. These strong contrasting colours gave people a sense of absurdity, conveying a surreal visual experience. In another work S.S. Hangover, he used two cameras on both sides of a river, recording the same moving boat in different directions, then juxtaposed the two symmetrical images together. The movement of the image of the video was bizarre and uncanny but also poetic. The moving boat started from one side to the another side in a circle, but in the video it looked like it moved from one river to another similar river. In his main work Visitor, he also arranged every screen image elaborately. Delicate instruments, decaying and abandoned old-fashioned houses, all the images were contextualized with music and performance.
He knew very well how to choose visual elements to reinforce dramatic and unusual feelings. The visual language contributing to an odd feeling is something I learned from this work.
Uncanny
Freud’s book Uncanny describes stories and work of literature to analyze what is uncanny, and it’s relationship with superstition, fairy-tales, fictions, and the reality of life’s experience. He also discusses some certain elements in which situations could raise strong uncanny feelings, including animism, magic and witchcraft, man’s attitude to death, another self or counterpart, involuntary repetition events or sign, coincidence with the predictions or curse, primitive beliefs be confirmed, lifeless thing or dead thing coming to life or revived, - something regarded for a long time as imaginary but appearing before us in reality. He used many vivid examples to analyze each factor.
All these elements mentioned above, are associated with ordinary life, most of them can be adopted in literature or film. For image creation aspect, especially, he mentioned the uncanniness also springs from when the familiar thing is hidden or repressed and then emerges from it. And when a symbol takes over the full functions and significance of the thing is symbolizes. These two points are very visible, providing me with new inspiration for painting. Something between familiar and unfamiliar, and something vital but deconstructing the original meaning, or has an ambiguous meaning, even reflecting some new ridiculous possibilities. These ideas can transform into an imagery motif. The uncanny feeling also has associations with cut off human limbs. Because after all the death is the most uncanny thing.
Bay of Pigs
Mr Lucky
Walhalla in White Cube
S.S. Hangover