Friedrich Kunath at White Cube Mason's Yard London.

I was wandering around the Piccadilly Circus area and decided to go view the exhibition by Friedrich Kunath. I have never seen his work before, and as a painter myself I thought it might be interesting to look at his different approach to painting both in terms of thoughts and techniques. The room on the ground floor contains his paintings about California sunsets, of average sizes overlaid with markings that resembled an A4 notepad that I interpreted as a break in the sunset so kind of making it unreal, that 'California Dreaming' is not really real.

In one of the paintings there is one cartoonish naked figure sitting on one of the notes that make up the note pad on the paintings; behind it is a dream scape beach which adds irony and humour to the whole picture but in a dark way because the character is hunched and smoking, and making the painting behind it meaningless, not real.

In the exhibition there is none of his work using ordinary objects, the focus is on the paintings that in the downstairs room are surreal with a repetition of cartoonish characters, different animals such as birds, giraffes, dogs to a name a few. The colours of the paintings are very bright, towards kitch, a painted pastiche of bright colours, cartoonish characters, animals, naked humans with a reflection to the past with figures from the past. In one painting there are groups of women resembling the Bronte sisters and workers. In another painting there are references to the 1960's, with group sex in another painting, while the cartoonish characters add humour to the pieces, which range from consciousness or subconsciousness downstairs to unreal dreamscapes upstairs and reminded me of illustrated posters. This is his take on popular culture, album covers from the 1960's.

In the middle of the room is a group of broken up colourful sea otters made out of ceramics and which have human feet and arms, these elements are used to destabilise the complacent way of viewing of the audience.

His works are a combination of drawings, painting, ceramics like a collage. The title of exhibition is  'I am running out of world' which has a negative connotation as he is implying that the world doesn't provide enough stimulus for him, that he has done everything, what else is there to explore in arts and his personal life; possibly that all has become a bit meaningless or that he no longer finds that the world is big enough for him especially the images downstairs which are full of characters, thoughts like there is so much of it that it takes the image off the edge and you are left with nothing, like a saturation of images and behind the happy smiley cartoonish figures really there is cynicism.

While the paintings in the room upstairs have a central focal point, the paintings in the room below don't; they are more like a collage apart from one painting. I hope he is seeing a therapist as he is undermining all the good things in life, from the sunsets, to the creative process in his work & not in a distant analytical way but in a personal way which is worrying; the sunsets and the smiles are there but behind them is real darkness, he is undermining the power of the creative process and everything else positive that comes with it. I hope that working this through his work is theraputic for him. But the dark side of his work reminds me that I find that many galleries in London seem to prefer such works over more positive, life-affirming creations which maybe they consider to be more superficial. There is a tendency of some contemporary art galleries to consider dark as cool. There should be room for more balanced displays.

After viewing the exhibition I decided to take the lift... don't know why because it was only one floor to go up and guess what? I got stuck in the lift. I just couldn't believe it! the receptionist was able to open the door and was very apologetic anyway I thought the incident was funny was glad to be out thought.

Artists that use toys in their work.

I have been looking at contemporary artists that use children's toys in their work. The ones I was aware of are the Chapman brothers and Jeff Koons, both at the opposite spectrum from each other but I have been really interested in looking to see if there are other artists who use toys in a different way and if they had a political message. I actually discovered that there are several contemporary artists using toys in their works and especially from Asia. The fist one which I saw was an exhibition of is Joe Black. His portraits are made of children's tiny plastic colourful soldiers like in the portrait of Mao, shown below, which are placed upright in a detailed stylised way. He explored the idea of one man as a central force, ideas of branding, the cult of personality, and he says himself on his website: the portrait encapsulates the idea of one man as unifying and equalising the force of thousands. The thousand soldiers make up the image. They are supposed to resonate with Mao's personality. Joe Black made portraits also of Obama, Picasso, Diana ( which was considered controversial as he used crashed toy cars) to open up new ways of seeing portraits and making them. 

He is not the first one to have made portraits using toys. There is also Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and his young 'Toy Soldier' below made out of children's toy soldiers, a reminder of childhood. His young face is fresh, his cap straight and open, in contrast with the many little toy soldiers from which the image is made. Some of the toy soldiers are fallen down, lying in different directions, as though they have been shot, reminding us of the horrors of wars and its violence. This contrasts with the innocence of the young soldier's face unaware of his future. This reminded me of his other work, portraits of worker's children in plantations in St Kitts, in which the beautiful bright shiny smiles are created from sugar cane, the very product that is imprisoning them.

The Lucy Walker documentary film, Waste Land, is based on his series 'Pictures of Garbage' where he employed Brazilian garbage pickers, the most marginalised in Brazilian society, (they use refuse to be sold again to survive as the only other options for them would be prostitution or drugs) from the Jardim Gramacho landfill where they receive 7,000 tons of garbage on a daily basis.
 

 

It is a high risk area with leprosy outbreaks, really a place without a future and where one can find easily dead bodies in the trash. The garbage pickers helped him realise large portraits of them made out of garbage collected at the site where they go every day; this is a project of social reform to change their lives through the power of creativity and turn them into art assistants as they have to construct their portraits from refuse, using the same refuse they deal with in their daily life. The money from the images sold will go to the garbage pickers co-op funded by Tiao the leader. Tiao in the picture below,  is styled after David's the Death of Marat, Muniz aims is to show the hard reality of life for the workers. Each of them was paid to participate in the project to show them a different way to do things, empowering them, marginalised people, at the end line of consumer culture. His work also, unlike that of Joe Black, touches the ephemeral quality of his portraits. I mean if you picked the toys out of the portraits, the garbage they are made of, you would be destroying the images.

 

Another artist who works in a very different way from the previous two is visual artist photographer Philip Toledo who made a whole series titled Hope and Fear using dolls in some of the portraits. He portrays people in suits made out of dolls see below.

 

 

The doll photograph is called Baby Suit, Possibilities of Thinking Out Loud, which clearly describes what one sees in the photograph, the costume they are wearing is an externalisation of their inner desires and fears. The photographs are beautifully executed,precise with the main people standing still and expressionless looking up or down, but one can feel the weight of the dolls on the person, which convey suspense or instability within the photograph, the apprehension of the photographer regarding what is taking place in American society. By this means he is also questioning the way beauty has been presented in classical portraits.

 

My Recent Paintings.

In my recent paintings I have been working with different mediums. I started off with oils then moved to acrylics with brighter colours to create different moods; some are bright day colours, others are more nocturnal colours. I was thinking of elements such as water, fire, earth.

 

Some of the paintings have a feeling of falling or rising, moving forward or backward, a transient moment between an image and a non image. I have been exploring suspension, is the image dissolving or is it about to happen? I have been using yellows from soft yellows to very strong ones with a glowing quality, and I have been observing how this glowing quality, or lack of it, can affect the overall painting and how the different moods relate to each other. Some of the paints, being translucent, are affected by how strong or weak the external light is, so they glow in a different way depending on the strength of the ambient light. The painting in this sense represents one's own inner 'I' and the difficulty of relating to what is around us in the external world.

 

 

I am exploring the idea of insecurity, instability.....can an image have power if it is unstable & abstract? Can we accept instability? Does everything have to be clearly explained to be understood? Or can we just go with the flow and accept without judging.

 

I love going to the movies and I have been looking at how colour is used in films, in particular in the films of Jean Luc Godard who was a highly innovative film colourist.

 

 

I liked what Godard said about travelling at night in Paris: 'What do you see? Splashes of red and green, flashes of yellow passing by. I wanted to recreate a sensation through the elements which constitute it. The sensation was that of pure colour.'

 

I am not thinking in terms of pure colours in my paintings but more of splashes or combinations of colours, rather than monochrome and precision painting, so as to show that even messy, uncertain, imprecise work can have a purpose and can hold its own. Godard wasn't an academic in the use of colour in movies but more of an improvising instinctive painter, as he said himself: 'Most of it came out of my head just before it was shot. I worked without notes like a painter'. 

 

This also applies to my current paintings and the way I work where I am pushing more for authenticity from immediacy, and I am interested in exploring how a painting can be developed so as to make an immediate impact on the viewer.