Mat Collishaw | THIS IS NOT AN
EXIT
14 February 2013 – 30 March
2013
London Hanover Square
For his second solo exhibition at Blain|Southern, THIS IS NOT AN EXIT,
the British artist Mat Collishaw returns to the medium of oil painting. However,
as is usual with his practice, nothing is literal; the primary source material
- magnified images drawn from the pages of glossy magazines - is a simple
metaphor, one part of a prism conceived to examine moral questions provoked by
the excessive binge culture that preceded the global financial crisis.
When seen from a distance, these large-scale works appear to be abstract
paintings constructed on a classic modernist grid; closer inspection reveals
them to be scraps of advertisements for luxury goods culled from ‘lifestyle’
magazines like Tatler and Vogue. But this is only partially the
case; they are in fact facsimiles of the precisely folded, origami-like ‘wraps’
used by drug dealers to package cocaine, complete with powdery traces of the
narcotic.
Our susceptibility to sensational imagery has long been central to
Collishaw’s work, and these sumptuous paintings continue this tradition. For
all their apparent swagger, they are in reality depictions of nothingness,
revealing the symbiotic space that exists between illusion and reality, absence
and presence. More prosaically, they are emblematic of the craven, insatiable
aspect of human nature that will pursue something to its very end whatever the
consequences, and yet inevitably remain unfulfilled. It is this unending
vicious cycle to which Collishaw alludes in the exhibition’s title; there is no
escape – this is not an exit – the words used at the close of Bret
Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho, which satirised the excesses of
Wall Street in the 1980s.
As with all of Collishaw’s oeuvre, multiple layers of meaning exist; the
grid structure teasingly feeds into the theories propounded by the French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his seminal work The Fold, in which he
argues that the world can be interpreted as a body of infinite folds and
surfaces that twist and weave through compressed time and space. Meanwhile, in
taking magazine images first used to advertise consumerist dreams, then for
selling cocaine, and finally as artworks hanging on the walls of a commercial
gallery, Collishaw offers a wry comment on the all-devouring nature of
capitalism.
His use of trompe l’oeil, making the squares of paper appear
three-dimensional, meditates further on the idea of illusion and reality, while
his harnessing of the geometric styles of Modernist painting contradict this.
Indeed, Collishaw sees the exhibition, in part, as a debasement of the medium
of painting, the most traditional art historical medium.‘You can’t just paint –
you have to address the whole history of painting and then make some sort of
paradigm shift,’ he says. ‘I’ve been trying to find a way to do this, and this
is my solution.’
THIS IS NOT AN EXIT will be marked by the most comprehensive publication of Collishaw’s
practice to date, including an essay by art historian Sue Hubbard and interview
by Rachel Campbell-Johnson.
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