Monday 22nd August – Post 2 – Musings on Understanding: John Devane, Wendy Elia, Linda H O’Grady.
Devane’s pieces contain contrasts and similarities, yet they have the look of a family, of a canon. For the artist, they are as much about the process and paint as they are about the subject and the resulting image. In turn, they contrast with Wendy Elia’s pieces, which I selected in this instance as they contain the same subject as sitter, Wendy’s dear friend, Maxime Angel. These are pieces which hold your gaze – for you are as observed as the subject within them. Although there is no real sense of paint as paint in these works, they are definitely composed images created in paint which (not painterly in technique, but not photographic in style, either) you are meant to read as an image, but which engage you as the sitter looks out of the canvas at you. Elia paints her own people; her friends and family populate her work – her mother, and currently her self-portrait with children and grandchildren are the subjects of pieces shown as part of the 20I0 & 20II BP Portrait Award at the NPG. They inhabit her space, the studio, and are brought to the viewer with selected objects, or signifiers, which sometimes recur from piece to piece, a sort of testimony of the passing of time as well as often details in a story to be told or to unfold to the observer or the insider. Elia has no interest in painting people she doesn’t know, and these pieces are definitely works which show her space and her connection with the subjects, whilst referring to the wider world and humanity. Maxime, herself a transgender performance artist adopts the poses and expressions that pull you into the work and make you want to look more in-depth, to unravel the story, to gain an understanding of the narrative – of which there could be many, rather than a definitive take.
Is Maxime performing, or showing her ‘real’ self? Is she collaborator, muse, or adopting the pose composed by Elia purely to convey her own meaning? In a way that feels much less personal, Linda H O’Grady’s work, shown in the same room, contains images of burlesque. These are overt images of performance and crafted identity, images which convey yet another element of human psyche, sexuality and playfulness. The subjects portrayed are in turn creating themselves – their public selves, we assume – and they are on a stage in the activity of the performance. The viewer is at a distance, and the partners in the images, though working together, have a sense of separateness. These paintings are images of the mindful ‘outsides’ of the people, which in the context of a painting give a ‘softer’ impression to the activity of observation (voyeurism?) than would a photograph. This is not a snapshot in time, though, but a representation of the formal constructs of costume, flesh and performance through paint. The setting is a club or a bar as opposed to an ambiguous space or a personal inner-world where people and creativity matter in yet another way, a different kind of artistry and a variation on artistic observation.
This room in the Head & Whole exhibition contains the work of four artists and I25 years of the passage of time since the Donnadieu was painted. Since then, the quest to gain skills in the understanding of human relationships in contemporary Western Society has spawned a multi-million-pound industry. The three contemporary artists here also have something else in common – that all have been a past or current finalist in the BP Portrait Award. Today, philosophers such as Cynthia Freeland are looking to portraiture in art, especially the modern period, to piece together the nature of the self. We have always interpreted art about people as being about the subject or the maker as well as the witting or unwitting testimony to elements of social history, and I hope that the Head & Whole wider project will contribute in some way to this tradition, as artists continue to work together.
