Viktor Vasnetsov. The Flying Carpet (1880).
Based on the Slavic folktale of the Firebird and depicting Prince Ivan returning with the fabled bird in a golden cage. Wikimedia Commons has a very large copy.
Category: {painting}
Painting
Fred Tomaselli at White Cube
left: Summer Swell (2007); right: Big Raven (2008).
I like Fred Tomaselli’s hyper-detailed psychotropic paintings a great deal. Londoners can see an exhibition of new work at the Mason’s Yard branch of White Cube until 16 May, 2009.
Tomaselli’s new work is a departure from his earlier, more direct use of pills, hemp leaves or ornithological references. The birds are painted with greater freedom, with each flame-like brushstroke animating the feathers as if an aura were radiating from the wild creature. Big Raven is inspired by the American Gothic tradition and the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, while Detail, with its dramatisation of the relationship between predator and prey, is a timely homage to Darwin’s Origin of the Species. The single, hypnotic gaze of Eye celebrates Tomaselli’s understanding of visual reciprocity – as if the bird were returning the artist’s affectionate stare. This reoccurs in the galaxies of multiple eyes found in his photograms, or monstrous apparitions created in direct response to front-page articles from the New York Times, through to the talismanic eye that emerges from the sea in Summer Swell, as if it were drowning in its own visual abundance.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Fred Tomaselli
False perspective
Satire on False Perspective by William Hogarth (1753).
Whoever makes a Design without the knowledge of Perspective will be liable to such absurdities as are shewn in this Frontispiece.
More eye-deceiving art for All Fools’ Day. Everyone knows MC Escher‘s pictures which continually played with the rules of perspective. Hogarth’s satire is less well-known and may even be the first of its kind. I haven’t seen any examples earlier than this.
A few contemporary equivalents follow, all of which can be found at Impossible World, a site devoted to visual disjunction.
National Portrait Gallery snubs Kylie Minogue and picks Nelson Mandela for gay icons list
Voo-doo: Hoochie Coochie and the Creative Spirit
Better late than never mentioning this exhibition which has been running at Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London, since mid-January.
The exhibition features those artists, writers and musicians who acknowledge the need to reach a heightened or ‘altered state’ in order to create their work. We look at the mystery of the creative act; not the inexplicable ‘spark’, aka inspiration, but the fire; the non-doing before the doing, the summoning up of elemental spirits from within, or without, during the preparation of some visual or musical work, some theory or idea. This welling-up or ‘possession’, this ‘fever in the heart of man’, this spirit, this spell, might sometimes be referred to as Voodoo.
Among the very varied selection of work the chief attraction for me would be the rare opportunity to see one of Mati Klarwein‘s major paintings, Crucifixion. I referred to this large and detailed picture last year as I was fortunate to be able to use it for the packaging of Jon Hassell’s Maarifa Street CD. And while we’re on the subject of Mr Hassell (who had a track entitled Voodoo Wind on his second album) he has a new CD out on ECM, Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street.
Voo-doo runs until April 4, 2009.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Mati Klarwein, 1932–2002
• Exuma: Obeah men and the voodoo groove
• Voodoo Macbeth