Revolutions, by there very nature, are unpredictable and in opposition to the establishment view of things. They arise in locations which we least expect and are driven by people we have never heard of before.
work by Fedele Spadafora
After Marcel Duchamp painted ‘Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2’ he entered it for exhibition in the Salon des Indépendants in March 1912 where Albert Gleizes, Chairman of the hanging committee, asked for a change to the title of the work. Duchamp withdrew his painting and instead entered it the following year into the Armory show where it caused a huge sensation. Only two years later, Duchamp began work on ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (the Large Glass)’ and the days of painting were numbered.
Yet artists continued with painting, exploring abstraction, Pop, photorealism and other forms well into the 1970’s when the art establishment finally became primarily concerned with installation, video, performance and conceptual movements. These forms built there foundations on the work of visionary artists such as Duchamp and Picasso who choose, just as Wittgenstein did with philosophy, to change the very nature of the game. The implications for art have been the placing of intellectualism at the heart of the creative process.
And so for the past thirty or so years, painting has been relegated to the status of a minor interest, uncool, unfashionable and something you might want to pursue as a hobby on a Sunday. Painting has been rejected as a medium capable of carrying any metaphor. Yet at the controversially named Slag Gallery in New York, we find a small group of young artists in their twenties and thirties who have decided to re-examine what painting has to offer. They have not only decided to engage with painting, but to paint the individual human figure in the most “traditional” ways possible. This raises an interesting question: Post Duchamp, what does painting have to offer an art-viewing public familiar with readymades, installations, photography and time-based media? The answer appears to be a return to the origins of artistic practice. Because what unites all artists is a desire to create a shift in our shared perceptions of the world.
The six artists on display at the Slag Gallery are Mellissa Carroll, Adam Miller, Aaron Miller, Bruno Perillo, Fedele Spadafora and Jessica Tam, with the show comprising of only fifteen works. Each piece is intimate in feel and offers a portrait of someone we have never seen before by artists who have never shown in New York before. It presents a world devoid of celebrity and glamour and instead confronts us with a face of human fragility and uncertainty. A ‘real’ world which is driven by the sensitivity of individual emotions rather than the apparent sureness of the intellect.
Of particular note is the small study by Fedele Spadafora, ‘Girl With Bottle’, a painting whose simplicity belies a great ability with the medium of paint. Jessica Tam’s ‘Fallen’ and Mellissa Carroll’s ‘Ben’ also offer us something beyond ourselves, something which hints at the passage of time and our sense of universal loneliness despite the noise and distractions society has to offer. These are paintings which present memory without sentimentality and as Spadafora himself says ‘a wish to engage with a primary source of expression’.
Three of the painters on display know each other, and the dialogue between them shows, just as the dialogue they are enjoying with past masters like Titan, Rembrandt and Goya is also clear. This is perhaps most apparent in the paintings by Adam Miller, whose technique is both subtle and accomplished, where washes of colour have been carefully built up to present solid figures composed of nothing more than translucent layers of paint.
The result is a visual universe which elevates the ordinary through the caress of repeated observation and a body of work where each drawing and painting is unique and best viewed “in the flesh.” This has the effect of placing the viewer at the centre of the artistic experience. It is an exhibition where we see artists attempting to create a pause in chaos so that we might find the magical in the mundane and awaken within ourselves a feeling of what the experience of human existence really means. It is an exhibition which echoes a growing view that all human action is driven primarily by human emotion which is rationalized and intellectualised after the event rather than before it.
work by Fedele Spadafora
Does this mark a turning point in the way artists wish to engage with an audience and a desire to turn away from the current art establishment who primarily value intellect over emotion? We cannot know yet, but what we can observe is a new and growing desire by many young artists to pick up a paint brush and ‘do something original’. After all, the word ‘original’ means to return to the origins.
Robert Priseman 2-4-2011
SLAG Gallery,Avenues, New York, NY10001. January 20 to February 20, 2011.