calendario eventi  :: 

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27/5/2008

After Dark

Eleven Fine Art, London

Curated by Coline Milliard

Cecilia Bonilla, Tobias Collier, Stephen Dunne, Jorge de la Garza, Rachel Goodyear and Franck Rezzak

After dark … when everything changes; the pace slows, the mind wonders. After Dark stitches together compulsive images with snippets of tales that sometimes verge on nightmares. Drawing on sources as varied as fashion magazines, Surrealism, hyperbolic geometry and cartoons, the works in After Dark lay claim to the fantastic and the surreal, making anxious exploration of the unknown.

Guillotines, dark hooded characters and sickly children emerge, as in an automatic drawing, from the intricate patterns of Stephen Dunne’s heavily-textured paint. In Schizo Epiphanies (2008), cartoony eyeballs fly through the images like so many shooting stars while threatening figures slowly appear from the background. Sometimes gruesome, sometimes hilarious and often in the uncomfortable zone between the two, Dunne’s oils on paper combine the horrific world of the living dead with the playfulness of Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

In Cecilia Bonilla’s series of collages Seascapes (2005-2007) hairs without head appear behind the horizon like the palm trees of a desert island. The alluring eroticism of the locks brings to mind a world of fantasy that echoes the image of the paradise faraway. Yet the source of the work – commercial images cut out from women’s magazines – is a comment on the origin of these fantasies, and the commonly marketed idea of an idyllic escape. The Seascapes unwrap the manufacture of collective aspirations.

Tobias Collier’s digital image Biscopic Cosmographica (2008) confronts Euclidian and Hyperbolic geometry, two opposing mathematical systems to apprehend the world, two attempts to make sense of the immensity of the universe. Inside a geometrical pattern, fictional constellations and firmament-blue patterns propose a re-mapping of the sky. Collier’s compulsive investigation of solar system imagery not only re-contextualizes a scientific aesthetic, but also explores the spiritual striving often underlying cosmology. Rachel Goodyear’s intricate pencil and watercolour on paper contrast a delicately intimate technique with an unsettling visual lexicon, filled with women vomiting birds’ heads, children swallowed by giant octopuses or, as in Phantom Pregnancy (2007), dark shadows in place of puppies. Often drawn directly on trivial ephemerals, and always displayed without frames to better emphasize their fragility, Goodyear’s vignettes hint at some dark stories, too disturbing to be told.

In Jorge de la Garza’s Arrangement 1 (2007) a cluster of toiletry bottles is lacquered with a deep and shiny black enamel, transforming the banal into the glamorous and obscure; in Telenovella (2006), blushing roses spring of mouse traps, as in a wry joke and the dangerous game of romance; De la Garza gives to pop imagery a surrealist twist. For his series of collages Dibujo del Rostro (2007) he tackles the difficult issue of artistic creation, replacing the eyes and forehead of his characters – themselves cut out of a 1960s drawing book – with pencils and brushes, the emblematic instruments of his trade. Frank Rezzak’s graphic universe functions as a dream-like distortion of the real. His drawings have drops of flesh dangling in the void, sexy faces stuck to worm-like bodies, lush jungles peopled with giggling skeletons and headless animals gathering in the barnyard. Each piece is a story in its own right, but taken together the images construct a grander narrative where the eternal fears of death and violence collapse in a joyful hysteria.

Private View Wednesday 28th May, 6-8pm

Eleven Fine Art
11 Eccleston Street, London

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