- Venue
- The Macbeth
- Location
- London
Andrew Walter, a recent graduate of the illustration programme at Kingston University, is exhibiting some drawings in the upstairs rooms of the arty Hoxton pub, The Macbeth.
They first look old fashioned: pen-and-ink, monochromatic and figurative. Then their real age and inheritance shows through, which is St Augustine and Jonathan Swift as much as Mervin Peake. They show the body, in various states of dispersal, putrifaction and defeat. In one scene a man's arms are knotted together in a huge grotesque ball while his shoe laces lie undone; another's hands seem to have exploded, with sections of finger floating around the picture plane. These two at least suggest worries about making, or making the body do what the brain demands.
With another showing a man in seizure as his brain and liver compete for his destruction, an Augustinian conviction, that badness arises from decay, is played out. 'For a thing to be bad is for it to fall away from being and tend to a state which it is not' – but these drawings – like the one describing rot as a nature’s free democratic meal – celebrate the fall away from being, rather than an ascetism. As Francis Bacon cheerily said, "of course, we are meat, we are all potential carcasses".
Gleefully pointing at the body’s fallibility extends to the human in general. There's a correlation with Gulliver, and how, through the four books of his travels, his view of humanity regresses from petty to grotesque, wicked and then bestial. It accompanies arrival at adulthood and the question of how to act as one learns more to the discredit of human nature. A subtitle to the show could be Gulliver's final view of human society as so many
'Gibers, Censurers, Backbiters, Pick-pockets, Highwaymen, House-breakers, Attorneys, Bawds, Buffoons, Gamesters, Politicians, Wits, Spleneticks, tedious Talkers, Controvertists, Ravishers, Murderers, Robbers, Virtuoso's'.
The detail and care with which these grotesques are rendered is at odds with fashionable faux-cackhandedness and is what makes the images absorbing: thoughts seem to be represented by black cloud-shapes; figures stagger around in blindfolds and lobotomy scars; Crumb-esque exclamation marks move between image and text; one Sisyphean character tries to carry a huge balding head on his shoulders, instead of taking it on a goat-drawn sled, as the background figures do.
While this and other images go as far as to be warnings in the tradition of the vanitas, ostentatious cynicism is avoided, or at least countered, by a powerful imagination and a remarkably defined, mature style.
