‘Blaue Engel’
CMYK Acrylic Screen Print on 350gsm Archival Paper
70cmX50cm
Edition 0f 50
Current portrait works take inspiration from the visual imagery of popular culture of the 1980s, it’s world of fashion, music, and youth. Portrayed in a classical manner from the neck up, taken at a three-quarters angle, each portrait is an exploration of performance, glamour, personality, novelty, surface, colour, mass production, nightclubs, Eurotrash, pop, the future.
Images merge in a tense photo-realistic style, appearing as they do to be devoid of underlying or hidden concepts. It is a retro futurism, identifying the future as a style infused with nostalgia, irony, and a time-bending dislocation. It offers futuristic visions articulated in a retro style, creating a back-and-forth dialogue between the past and the future.
It features an interchange of harder and softer lines, bright and shiny colour in the photorealistic vein. There is a tension created between clear and blurred lines tracing the outline of the figure’s face, clothing and jewellery. Hyper-exposed faces emerge from the illustration’s background, and are confined to some basic facial features. The bright reds on the lips or cheeks in the portrait provide a youthful tone. No time and space are suggested, forms float in an imaginary time space, which can only partially be indicated by the slight fashion details. Constant intertextual interplay evokes complex feelings of nostalgia that represent the past with a sadness that is blended with a small measure of pleasure, a yearning for the past decades, a clear vision of a luxurious escapist world. These female portraits call one like a Siren to escape into the near future or the long-forgotten past with an explosion of pigments.
The works seek to merge a number of painterly appearances and techniques within each. The screen print process used to print the images, though very technical in its application, replicates brush and spray marks and gestures. The soft sprayed look of the art produces a highly aestheticized, nostalgic art language that is devoid of genuine historicity , and uses this method of pastiche in a manner that subverts dominant discourses by creatively merging of different artistic styles and popular culture elements in a way that challenges the once characteristic dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow culture.
Spray paint techniques rather than being the preserve of the street artist (sic), have featured among the materials employed in the work of artists Lucio Fontana, Richard Hamilton, Yves Klein, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Harnessing the gestural, unpredictable, projectile qualities of spray paint, these artists and others have repurposed it as an alternative to the brush, to create hazy textures, drips & puddles. Spray paint has offered artists an immediacy, the ability to improvise, and versatility.
Original drawings once scanned are produced using the CMYK Four Colour Process technique. Colours are individually applied, starting with Cyan, and then the rest of the process colours applied in the order, cyan, magenta and black. Each colour is applied in a set pattern of tiny dots that appear to create a solid colour, similar to the pixels on a digital image. Layers of these dots in different amounts of ink create any shade or colour.
