Anodyne
Thursday, May 10, 2012
 
Collectively, the works assembled here do have a strong proselytising intent. They are [his] way of preaching two messages: his stated passion for the vibrancy of the natural world; and his faith in the languages of art, as opposed to what he calls the monocular tyranny of photography, to represent that world as no other medium can.


Hence, perhaps, his magpie eclecticism, his multiple borrowings from the canon of past art.


The exuberant ventriloquism and quasi-pantheistic devotion to Nature are not always convincing. There is often the suspicion of a gap between what the artist has willed himself to create and what he has actually created.


A suppressed charge of melancholy lurks behind the bright surfaces of many of these pictures, hints even of a conscious morbidity and loneliness in some of their most insistent motifs: the recurring barren trunk of a stricken tree, the road or passage leading to some ominous, mysterious horizon. Glummest of all are those multi-camera works: split-screen meditations on a natural world that often appears a blank and forbidding place, seen from a car moving with the funereal slowness of a hearse.
- posted by cjb @ 11:27 AM


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