Macabre Meanderings

Playground (acrylic on canvas). Courtesy of the artist.

From 26th July until 30th September 2011, BRINK will be showcasing a small selection of works by Stratford-based artist, Andrew Christopher at Kenilworth Wines.

                                       

The artist, who studied at Jacob Kramer (Leeds College of Art) and London Guildhall University, has exhibited nationwide and has recently held his solo show 'Telling Tales' at Gallery150 in Leamington Spa -and what telling tales they are. 

In the Vino Veritas Showcase, BRINK will be presenting two works from this series. The first is an acrylic on canvas piece, entitled 'Playground'. The inner ear immediately perceives the echoing sounds of children at play. The flashes of the colours of infantile nightmares and blurry shadows evoke that grimy, heavy feel of those never-ending days at school, almost alluding to the fact that childhood is both a beautiful, curious and intensely terrifying state, perhaps even dangerous. 

Here you linger on a knife’s edge. There is a sense of the oblivion and blind spontaneity of youth; how a child can be in one instant angelic, and then in another incredibly animalistic and cruel. One has the uncanny feeling that, beneath the surface, something sinister is lurking in the shadows or is about to happen. The fiery, almost foreboding shadow of the trees, the eerie light and unnatural colours of what appears to be a polluted sky remind us again of an impending doom. 

However, playing on the susceptibility of the onlooker's mind, the artists gives us no clues as to what this may be. You cannot tell if you are looking through the eyes of another or your own. It is a story in the making and it is you, the viewer, who must finish the tale.

The Crying Man at Goya's Tree (ink on paper). Courtesy of the artist.

The second work on show is an intricately detailed pen and ink drawing, called 'The Crying Man at Goya's Tree'. Here we find a myriad of references and with them a myriad of questions bubble to the surface.  

On a branch to the right we see a baboon quietly observing a rather disconcerting scene. A boy sits on a rock head in hands, his dog by his side; a man sits sobbing at the foot of a dead tree; two white doves are perched upon a branch, while in the background a rather suspect Ronald McDonald is hanging from the tree, his arm still held in what appears to be his customary friendly wave, but with an ominous finger raised upwards.

The references to domesticity – the boy, the pet, the father – and the absence of a mother figure may imply that our ‘nuclear family’ is not quite what it seems or how it should be.

Are they mourning for the economic crisis and the downfall of Capitalism? Are they awaiting a peace that never arrives? Did they kill “everyones’ favourite clown”?

It is not a post-apocalyptic scene because they are surrounded by grass, hills and leafy trees, but the dying tree and the reference to the multinational colossal could refer to the destruction that many corporations reap on the resources of the world. But, as with plate 39 from Francisco Goya’s, Los Desatres de la Guerra, entitled Grande hazaña! Con muertos! (Great deeds! Against the dead!),  it could also allude to a more Tolstoyan view of non-violent action against oppression, underlining the futility, cowardice and emptiness of such atrocious acts.

If we then go on to investigate the ancient Egyptian symbolism of the Baboon we come across the bloodthirsty underworld deity, Babi, famous for feasting on entrails. Indeed, the Egyptians’ believed  that baboons (the Alpha-males at least) were dead and actually the reincarnation of deceased rulers. Believed to be the first born son of Osiris, the god of the dead, Babi devoured the souls of the wicked after they were judged by Ma’at, the embodiment of truth and order.

Maybe, our Baboon is waiting in the wings to devour them all.

Sarah Silver

On show at:

Kenilworth Wines, 14 Talisman Square, Kenilworth, Warwickshire CV8 1JB.

For further information please contact: brinkevents@gmail.com