Events Arrive On Doves’ Feet
This artwork featured in Synthetic Landscapes (2017).
The abstract development in Quinn’s recent work demonstrates the power and richness that can be achieved by the inter-penetration of narrative and formal structure. The artist does not consider these works to be dealing with abstraction perse, but more the interweaving of the visual rhetoric of the historical avant-gardes of constructivism, modernism and postmodernism; to bring transformational properties to the works through the inter-varied effects produced by the confrontational circulation of images. These works testify to Quinn’s fascination with the aesthetics of the reception (rather than the production) of such movements.
Immediately, the horizontal bands of blocked green appear to claim a formal precedence in the work as an abstract intervention, yet there is no intention to raise the value of the utopian, revolutionary aesthetics of abstraction here. The Western (capitalist) consumer revolution heightened brand image to fetish level–how to sell utopia–and if you’re not feeling very utopian, you could always take some of these. The bands are taken from the packaging of the sedative Midazolam; designed to reduce anxiety, seizures and psychological disorders, it is now, contentiously, used to replace pentobarbital as the first drug in the three drug protocol of execution by lethal injection. Utopian claims and dystopian ends.
The constructivist structure references Naum Gabo’s “Head of a Woman” [1917–20] and contains an assemblage of images including the inverted image of “Coup d’oeil du Theatre de Besancon” [1780] by the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, where the focus of the eye both reflects inwards and gazes out. This inverted reference to the work of Ledoux highlights the circulation of imagery. Working at the time of the French revolution, Ledoux was no political revolutionary but the formal transformations and utopian aspirations of his architectural designs saw him as the eponymous hero of early 20th Century modernist architecture. The glimpse of an eye and a trick on the eye. The trompe l’oeil postcards, tacked to the canvas as if by masking tape–high art-cinema images (from Nosferatu (FW Murnau, Germany 1922 and Andrei Rublev ( A Tarkovsky, Russia,1966) reduced to aide memoirs studio-wall ephemera.
Through the ‘still’, cinema is denied its elements of time and movement, and is reduced here still further by the action of painting them in thin tableaux. The image of the anatomical dissection of two heads floating in a fog-like aura plays neatly with ideas of reason and the clouds preventing or delaying understanding. The Cloud of Unknowing. There is another reference here; that of Heidegger’s concept of duality of being where the fog denies any concrete, Cartesian, distinction between the subject that thinks and the objects around it that do not. The thinking brain is stripped back and turned into an object in itself.
Image: Ged Quinn, Events Arrive On Doves’ Feet, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.
About the artist
Ged Quinn
Ged Quinn exhibited in Living Ruins, Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum, 2019, and Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park; Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017.
Image: Ged Quinn, Bela Forgets the Scissors, 2016. Oil on linen. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery.