| Description: | The paintings of Ged Quinn are at once real and fallacious. Landscapes by Romantic masters including Claude Lorraine and Casper David Friednich are reworked, typically on oversized canvases, translating Arcadian visions to ambiguous places with latent narratives. From this variegated metaphorical fabnic, Quinn develops and displays an irreverent array of Western cultural references. Temporal logic is negated, and the source material distorted beyond rational interpretation - if, that is, the Sublime may ever be rational.
Places in the World to Hide 2008, a painting from one of Thomas Cole's vast allegorical cycles The Course of Empire 1836, becomes the setting for a dilapidated shanty town. At its entrance stands a decorative gate to a heaven more funeral panlour than Romantic Elysium. Blood-stained clothes and a Sudarium hang on a line above furthen ramshackle evidence of the dwelling's unknown, unseen inhabitants. From the left appnoaches a traveller carrying a magic lantenn and weaning a makeshift gas mask to protect against the arena of disaster on whose threshold he stands. Swastika-branded sheep at his feet further mythologise this strange explorer, a wandering soul discovering, returning, or perhaps already departed.
In another work, based upon a Jacob van Ruisdael seascape, a raft is caught in turbulent seas in implicit allusion to Delacroix's Raft of the Medusa. With the helmsman adrift the vessel's covering has blown back to reveal a reliquary containing the body of a saint, part human part bird. As it runs aground the raft's cargo breaks loose and is lost to the water. Above this debacle, in a tempestuous sky, looms a version of Dante's circles of hell at a scale making it resemble also some kind of industrial lowering planet or Death Star. The interplay between representation, history, legend, fact and make-believe is heightened through the addition of trompe l'oeil slashes to the surface of the painting. Making explicit the act, the illusion and the politics of image making, the markings (a reference to the attack on Velasquez' s The Rokeby Venus) call into question the relevance of history painting to the contemporary, and the larger, more universal formation and consumption of cultural discourse.
The references embedded within Quinn's canvases should collide and destroy each other. Yet somehow, through the weird familiarity of their sources, they edge towards resolution of a kind. This is not to say the narratives that start and stop, confined to the space of the painting, find an ordered development or progression; but the figures and references that squat within his works do seem meant to be there. Quinn conceives of his appropriated, re-imaginings of the locations from art history as real places and real states. The Arcadian nostalgia of Claude or the turbulent Nature-versus-life metaphors of Ruisdael become counter-weights to Quinn's contemporary preoccupations. The result is an uneasy, haunting balance that disturbs and lingers like an unfinished dream. LS
[MORE][LESS]The paintings of Ged Quinn are at once real and fallacious. Landscapes by Romantic masters including Claude Lorraine and Casper David Friednich are reworked, typically on oversized canvases, translating Arcadian visions to ambiguous places with latent narratives. From this variegated metaphorical fabnic, Quinn develops and displays an irreverent array of Western cultural references. Temporal logic is negated, and the source material distorted beyond rational interpretation - if, that is, the Sublime may ever be rational.
Places in the World to Hide 2008, a painting from one of Thomas Cole's vast allegorical cycles The Course of Empire 1836, becomes the setting for a dilapidated shanty town. At its entrance stands a decorative gate to a heaven more funeral panlour than Romantic Elysium. Blood-stained clothes and a Sudarium hang on a line above furthen ramshackle evidence of the dwelling's unknown, unseen inhabitants. From the left appnoaches a traveller carrying a magic lantenn and weaning a makeshift gas mask to protect against the arena of disaster on whose threshold he stands. Swastika-branded sheep at his feet further mythologise this strange explorer, a wandering soul discovering, returning, or perhaps already departed.
In another work, based upon a Jacob van Ruisdael seascape, a raft is caught in turbulent seas in implicit allusion to Delacroix's Raft of the Medusa. With the helmsman adrift the vessel's covering has blown back to reveal a reliquary containing the body of a saint, part human part bird. As it runs aground the raft's cargo breaks loose and is lost to the water. Above this debacle, in a tempestuous sky, looms a version of Dante's circles of hell at a scale making it resemble also some kind of industrial lowering planet or Death Star. The interplay between representation, history, legend, fact and make-believe is heightened through the addition of trompe l'oeil slashes to the surface of the painting. Making explicit the act, the illusion and the politics of image making, the markings (a reference to the attack on Velasquez' s The Rokeby Venus) call into question the relevance of history painting to the contemporary, and the larger, more universal formation and consumption of cultural discourse.
The references embedded within Quinn's canvases should collide and destroy each other. Yet somehow, through the weird familiarity of their sources, they edge towards resolution of a kind. This is not to say the narratives that start and stop, confined to the space of the painting, find an ordered development or progression; but the figures and references that squat within his works do seem meant to be there. Quinn conceives of his appropriated, re-imaginings of the locations from art history as real places and real states. The Arcadian nostalgia of Claude or the turbulent Nature-versus-life metaphors of Ruisdael become counter-weights to Quinn's contemporary preoccupations. The result is an uneasy, haunting balance that disturbs and lingers like an unfinished dream. LS
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