'Faces 08' at 34 Long
by Nadja Daehnke
In the gallery press release, 'Faces 08' is described as a 'conceptual understanding' of portraiture. Here the concern is not with recording individuality or status as traditionally associated with this genre, but rather with extending the notion of physical appearance into commentary on the current milieu. Within this core premise there are strong themes addressed, including the self-referentiality of Norman Catherine's Soliloquy, questions on the post-human, and overtly socio-political commentary.
Marlene Dumas' beautiful elegy Fog of War relies on expressive marks and emotive, handwritten poetry to signal the artist's very personal and visceral response to the tragedy of war. Dumas places an equivalent emphasis on individual reflection and authorial presence in her work Semite. This overtly subjective and embodied approach stands in stark contrast to the majority of works on this show, where a superflat, distanced and satirical aesthetic prevails.
Yue Minjun, Takashi Murakami, Mr, Colin Payne and Hiroyuki Matsuura all use seamless, flat and graphic-novel inspired working methods which suggest the engineered reality of a media-saturated world. The faces these artists present are not about humans as natural (whatever that may be), but rather speak of the human as inescapably constructed by, and part of, a media-shaped culture. As a self-portrait one would expect Yue Minjun's Untitled to record particular features or characteristics of the artist; instead this print confronts one with a cynical schema of a human face rendered in flat fields of garish cartoon-pink colours.
Echoing Enlightenment medical engravings, the skin in Minjun's Untitled is shown as peeled back from the eye socket. But whereas these historical medical engravings celebrate the vulnerability and wonder of the biological body revealed, the distortions, exaggerations and dissections in Minjun's artwork instead suggest the unnaturalness and superficiality of a media- and technology-determined human.
Similarly Matsuura's Manga-inspired figures present beings that have mutated beyond the human. Typical of the Manga genre, hugely enlarged eyes and child-like distortions give these figures an endearing, at times even disconcertingly sexual, character. The edginess of combining the child-like with the sexual (the big eyed, big-haired girl in Freesia) or with the violent (the samurai-like figure of Rai-Zin) serves to both attract and repel. A similar attraction and unsettling occurs as these graphic-novel beings are very emphatically not human, and yet seem to elicit and convey human emotion to a far greater extent than many a naturalistic representation of the human face would. Matsuura thus points to a world where not only the physical, but also the emotional become a spectacle accessed through the fictions and stereotypes of the media.
This relation between reality and fiction is a central concern in Asha Zero's series of paintings. Disembodied mouths and eyes, obviously drawn from fashion photographs, point to the construction of norms and expectations of beauty, particularly in popular women's magazines. This fictionalisation of female bodies is underscored by the idealised body parts appearing alongside comic characters in the paintings. Equivalence is suggested between Photoshopped images of heavily made-up eyes and pouting mouths, and the explicitly fictional, distorted half-human, half-animals of the cartoon world.
On a formal level, Zero's paintings reference the multiple layers of graffiti, pasting and decay of an urban wall; presumably an analogy for the multiple layers of reality and fiction we engage with in the everyday. Even though the facial details appearing in his work look like they were cut from magazines and collaged onto the artworks' surfaces, they are in reality tromp-l'oeil paintings. This confusion, this tricking of the eye, suggests a world in which there is no longer a real, but only a simulation of the real.
Similarly D*Face's use of iconic images of Queen Elizabeth and Sid Vicious suggest the fictionalisation of lives within a celebrity-obsessed culture. He highlights the idea that within a culture of spectacle public personae transcend the human to become commodities.
The exhibition also includes contributions by Paul du Toit, William Kentridge and Chinese artist Zhang Dali, which seem to stand apart from the wider themes apparent in the rest of the exhibition. Indeed, the agendas and artistic approaches represented in this exhibition are so widely divergent that one senses that the central themes occurred in spite of, rather than because of, curatorial choices.
Opens: August 12
Closes: September 6
34Long
34 Long Street, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 426 4594
Email: fineart@34long.com
www.34long.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 2pm
