Weirdo Noir

Distorted Room for More, 5 Feb 2011

By 

Dr. Delvis Memphistopheles “FIST” (London) –

  

  

All the post 45 consumer culture artefacts have been piped up; Fleischer, Avery and Disney then whisked into in a blender mix. The puree has then had other important pieces; Elvis, Rotten, P-Orridge, Industrial, Rockabilly, Punk whizzed together with doses of THC and lysergia. Then strained through a fine sieve. The coatings, used by artists who know Duchamps, Max Ernst, Breton, Ernst Fuchs, Andre Masson, Bunuel, Magritte, Dali and Eluard all served and doused with Dix and Grosz. This is the intial paste. The artist have then conjured up their historical personal lives and dreams of the future to create these pieces of soul poetry.

This is the result are a new cultural flowering based on a vibrant silt from which new forms can grow and flourish.

A saunter through an aquarium of dreamworlds minus the Roger Dean kitsch take. This connects to the real imaginations rather than an escape to esoterica marking the self absorbed worlds of the 60’s. Artists intent on facing up to the real world of bodies, sex, prostitution, abuse, fear, lust, carnality, “spasticity” to create a raw vision based less on derision and more overcoming.

A marker and victory of the punk sensibility over the dreamworld middlebrow hippiedom which relegated the violence of this world within its happy clappy negation. Punks faced up to reality and poured forth an overboard expression of anger. See Lydia Lunch’s Daddy Dearest for the tour of the family and Beth B films for an internal exposure.

This tames the anger and diverts it into other streams, drawing on more than nihilism but a reformulation of a beauty aesthetic. Connecting to the shadow, the umbra that which is normally hidden, these artists pull this out of the closets and transform it into beauty within the beast.

The aesthetic noir shimmer of Glenn Barr beauties/beasts trapped in locked down brown worlds. Ray Caesar with his supine Sophie Ellis Bextor type dolls caught in hyper sensual moments, a nod to Hans Bellmer but these are made into flesh. The richly detailed nightmare nursery rhymes of Jonathan Bergeron, Fred Harper’s surreal dreamworlds building on the originals with their interiors, Tara McPherson’s startling take on feminimity is both sensual, soaked in pathos and startlingly alluring. Travis Louie’s deformed bourgeois sepia soft focus cameos of relatives stuck in the attic bring out the dread.

These are the pull towards the other lesser known artists who each and everyone display more imagination than a million accountants locked together in a city ghetto clucking over the antics in the local news. These all show the door to other worlds where something stirs other than corporate sales.

Bored of living a still life? Jump in and make a big splash!

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