Holy Crap and Transcendental Stupidity.


HELLO

In the beginning was the word and the word was apparently hello. It hangs above the not so eternal flame of extinguished countenance like a taunt. Hello, goodbye and fuck-off all in one. The writing here is not on the wall but in the air. All smoke and no mirrors. Words that put the snuff back into snuffed out. From these religious wicks we may expect portraits of God but are given in their place only scripts of semi-legible profanity. I remember the artists once telling me that ‘hello’ was just practice for ‘fuck’.


FUCK

I wondered by the same token whether Fuck was also practice for Holy Moly? Blasphemy and procreation might after all give birth to something credulously sacred - something like the invocation of a Captain Marvel deity. Equally it might not be practice for anything at all. It might just be itself, in all its transitive, intransitive, adjectival, adverbal and conjunctive forms. Freud, when reminded by an acolyte that smoking cigars is a phallic activity, famously responded cigar in hand that, “Sometimes a good cigar is just a good cigar.” By the same token we might be inclined to think a good Fuck is just a good fuck - even when its one that’s painted above a just extinguished candle.


HOLY MOLY

If we are to take Genesis as the most reliable godly codex of not just our creation but creation in general, light came first. But, while this version has God busy dividing light from darkness, later newer testaments claim that in the beginning was the word. Language, it might reasonably assumed was forged of darkness, or put another way, appropriate to these works, came out of the blue. Either way, it was language and light that penetrated the recesses of the inchoate void from which heaven and earth were formed. Caption and illumination became one, a version of events clearly understood by the catholic Ed Ruscha when he made works such as ‘Sin, with Olives’, but ignored but the protestant Gerhard Richter when he made a series of candle paintings shown singly, in pairs or groups of three and in one instance with a skull. The flame of these paintings tilt slightly and the molten wax beneath emits a corresponding glow. They seem, indirectly at least, to reference the vanitas traditions of old master painters such as Georges de la Tour and Francisco Zurbaran. Like the hourglass, mirror and other accoutrements of the tradition the candle flame meters time. The light depicted in Richter’s candle paintings is not the divine light of godly presence so much as the fragile flame of our mortality. But the light of Holy Moly continues to shine long after the flame has been extinguished, suggesting that somewhere between the word and the wick hangs the auratic halo of what was not fully realized, or seen. And so perhaps it ’s a painting not of a dumb Disney still, but of creation itself, made by one for whom the injunction against the graven image provides for the biblical ingrediants of a more literal enlightenment.


GOING GOING GONE

Seventy odd years after the release of its second feature-animation the cartoon civilization of Disney has become our very own spiritual Pompeii. Preserved not in lava but in oil, glaze and paint, its narrative extractions have taken the monumental form of large canvasses punked from the bourgeois form of their adopted ancestors. Consciously perhaps, their calibrations of old fashioned virtue and contemporary stupidity continue to play on the suggestion that while the rich and silly may still prefer to celebrate their indolence and privilege amidst the fine-tuned harmonic fibrillations of atmosphere and surface, disposable income and disposable time still remain at odds with one another. And so it may be that we find ourselves amongst still-lives of moving images. The twenty-fourth of a second life-cycle of the original animation cell is here rendered in the geological time of painting; of mixed colors and messages, endlessly deferred decisions, and all the other mental pentimenti that inflect and nuance the tautness of their surface and the staging of their counterfeit rebellion against transience. It is said that the average time spent looking at a work of art is four seconds - about the time it takes to blow out a candle. Such, perhaps, is the reward bestowed by the audience on the objects of their inattention.


SO LONG

Imagine Vermeer’s ‘Allegory of faith’ remade by a meticulously obsessive skate punk for whom a simultaneous faith and doubt of painting could only be expressed by processing Warhol’s serial mechanized aesthetic through the trials and tribulations of his own hand. Vermeer’s ‘least admired’ work is often cited as a valiant, but failed, attempt to convey the faith he deeply felt, yet was then ill-equipped to paint. The figure of faith has the world at her feet and yet it is the celestial sphere above her head that reflects the shattered panes of the artist’s studio as well as those, perhaps, of his ambition. Pinocchio also dreams of becoming more than the pine-wood of which he is carved. In the story he comes alive. In Disney’s film he is literally animated. Each hand-drawn, hand-colored frame is itself a retelling of Collodi’s parable. Gepetto discovers through his promethean powers that the world is also at his feet. At the same time he learns that the illusion of his creation is fallible and prone to a kind of mendacity that would leave any figure of faith clutching his or her breast caught in a Freudian reel of a long nosed penises and lies. Words, even those wrought in the smoke of graffitied insolence, appear to struggle in the ontological twilight.


BLOW ME

What are we talking about here? Extinguishing the holy flame that keeps us up at night devising new ways to create meaning out history and tradition, truth and lies, pinewood effigies and pop cultures, dead still paintings and flickering movies or just extinguishing our desire at the hands of another?  From the candle’s point of view blow me in smoke is as paradoxical as Pinocchio saying my nose will grow now…


BOO FUCK'N HOO

The original source image for the paintings came from ‘The Illusion of Life’, a five hundred and seventy six page bible of the animated scripture according to Walt. Different printings and publishers yielded the different color palettes and levels of sharpness and clarity that waft through each like the ghost of deceased atmosphere. In each painting the density of paint its subtly different, ranging as it does from the acrid crisp autumnal hues of ‘Me and you’ to the Delft-like blue glazes of ‘Holy Crap.’ Just as the candle-flame has been extinguished so it seems that the same oxygen from which it drew and that gave depth to the image has also been drained. The surfaces of these works, built as they are of countless layers of paint and effort, refuse to yield to the promise of illusion and the carriage of their craft. In its place we are offered a form of photorealism so voided of its debt to the original as to have come full circle having passed through the margins of both photography and realism to return its own form of highly abstract painting. The serial originality of the paintings reflects the fact that the artwork from which they were drawn was itself conceived as part of a sequential procession of images designed to mark time - albeit in this instance the time of film not that of their making. What was the illusion of life has here becomes the illusion of painting. And between materiality and illusion lies something far more abstract. Questions rise out of the different strata to linger like smoke. How many layers of removal can you put between yourself and your subject and still claim not to be an abstract painting? How many layers of glaze can you add to the canvas and still claim that you are creating and embellishing an image and not erasing the horror vacui of the blank canvass? How many times do you have to paint the same image before hello really does become fuck? What does it take to destroy the auratic power of the original and have something new rise phoenix like from the wisps of disappearance?


ME & YOU

Like Gepetto, we worship at altars of our own creation. His workspace is the flat surface of the table just as the artists is that of the painting. It was there that Gepetto wrought life out of inanimate matter to become himself old master of new form. And to the extent that the paintings carry with them the dual atmosphere of crime-scene and immaculate conception it may be that each image sites on the diving line between light and darkness, of heaven and hell. Jiminy Cricket, the grasshopper who acts as Pinochio ’s conscience may be tattooed on - and perhaps looking over the artist shoulder - but it’s the flat easel of Gepetto’s creationism not its morality that, I believe, interests him. We’re all in this together it seems to say. One man’s creation is another’s creationism it seems to say, and only fools rush like me and you rush in to see what lies beneath the hallowed ground.


NO WAY JOSE

And lets not forget the value of celebrating the monuments our culture raises to pointlessness and futility and the importance of contaminating their sacred status with the dumb blasphemy and misdirected attention. The smoke draws a fine line between stupidity and wisdom. As with any celebration of stupidity one must first show oneself to be exonerated from its insinuation. This is not easy since, as everyone knows, making a show being clever is itself stupid. Indeed that which shows or more specifically shows-off anything that asserts itself to be particularly clever, magnetizes stupidity. The vacant lot above the candle is the space where not just the scared and profane conjoin but where the dance of history partners with the jackass. It is the space in which we are asked to proclaim everything we don’t know, the space, in other words, in which we give shape to our ignorance.


HOLY CRAP

“Seven days always seemed like a bit of an exaggeration…” was the title the artist gave to one of his previous shows. Maybe God also knows how to burn the candle at both ends.


WHATEVER

What are we to make of a series of works that introduces itself so politely yet leaves us on a note of indifference? Perhaps it’s that somewhere between Hello and Whatever that we find the formations, however tenuous and hubristic, of our religious leanings and the articles of skepticism and faith that permit paintings of cartoon candles to become portraits of god. Nor should we find this surprising given that regardless of burning of flames such as these more like than not no one knows the truth, either about themselves or anyone else, and all recorded human acts and words may be open testimony to our endless efforts to know each other and where we have come from, and our failure to do so. Or, to put another way, it might that out of the bright flicker of animated procession is born the adagio sermon of Hello, Fuck, Holy Moly, Going Gone, So Long, Blow me, Boo Fucking Hoo, Me & You, No Way Jose, Holy crap, Whatever…



Daydream nation.





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