Saturday 5 September 2020

Brian Mountford : Recent Paintings

    'Everlasting Gobstopper' - Brian Mountford


Mountford's paintings appear to be the nightmare imaginings of Philip Gustons crude and bloated paranoid figures.

 

Perplexing tapestries and tumbles of gizzards and body parts caricaturing the ponderous heft of real meaty innards. Or crudely and painfully dismantled living portraiture trapped in a hamster wheel of perpetual disassembly.

 

There's a hastily assembled pile of splayed hands and crinkled chunks of flesh peppered with eyeballs, their synchronised mechanical stares keening towards a point outside the framing rectangle of the canvas. Sausages of intestines are about to transmutate into turgid larva or insectoid pastiches of optic nerves. A blindly mechanistic tangle of tubes acts as a lumpen concretion of cartoon matter.

 

All cling to the wall like idiot hierarchies of dead materials straining towards agency and autonomy. Occasionally they are infected by decorative patterns which seem to creep like predatory abstractions dismantling the saccharine optimism of the colourful and synthetic palette.

 

Tethered to the picture surface by coloured muck, these psychedelic cousins of

Arcimboldo's proto-Surrealist vegetable heads suffer from a vague awareness of their own impermanence as whimsical fictions, contingent on external forces always beyond their comprehension.

 

It is not just a case of a staging of the typography of flesh as a psychological model of the human psyche or, indeed, a fixing of any concept within this cryptozoology of peculiar hybrids.

 

For Mountford the act of picturing an image is itself the essential core of the fact of painting. That's why the creatures of Mountford's dreamscapes radiate ennui and angst, like sullen hormonal teenagers they resent the processes building them whilst being begrudgingly aware that they are products of these processes.

 

The ineffable slipperiness of material objects as embodied meaning is being repeatedly restaged as potential narrative jumbles of a distantly remembered, antique plasticity.

 

But these cartoon distortions cannot indulge themselves by lounging in the way-station of the liminal, this will never be a comforting option, they remain perpetually impressed in the crust of surface paint that birthed them.

 

Without the possibility of recourse to material volume, they fall back on optical

volume to demand attention; strident and giddy bastard children of headshop posters.

 

Neon pseudocoma victims dreaming of the slop and sweat of imperfect flesh, they perform their poses whilst pleading for release from the eternal circus of art as a painterly self-flagellation and performance for the viewers entertainment.

  




 

Friday 4 September 2020

Digi-Snaps: Let's Keep The Crap Ones.

 




 It seems to go like this:

 

The fading of printed photographs, those temporary slowing downs of the material  decay of things pictured, is an inevitable process. But, when considering the digitally reproducible, now incapable of attaching itself to a printed object this process of decay has become internalised by viewers and attached itself to the fungoid puffballs of our brains.

 

Like a William Burroughs mutating virus it has sneakily morphed into an unavoidable neurological condition. That of an atrophying physiological capacity to retain and store information, begrudgingly accepted by greedily addicted consumers of tsunamis of semi-random visual stuff.

 

And it is true that, rather than a parade of revealed truths, the profound and profane shallowness of vast quantities of moments and events pictured leaves the brains memory muscles weaker and less efficiently pliable.

 

Additionally, the whole procedure leaves an uncomfortable residue, the feeling that some unknowable external force has wiped its arse on the eyeballs.

 

Although it may leave a hazy cataract of stupidity clouding any selective filtration between hungry eye and passive brain this ocular coprophilia is infuriatingly addictive. Largely because the warm porridge of digi-snaps we mutually bathe in also acts as a sustaining social glue, a binding of bewildered status monkeys into something like a community.

 

However, if the unexamined life is not really worth living we all have a suspicion that the purely self-examined life is one never lived.

 

The reality is that most people toss their pennyworth of pictorial fun into a sea of images then register its efficiency by the ripples it makes. Is it reposted, rejigged, bastardised, recontextualised, generally pissed about with? And, more significantly, how often?

 

This could be claimed to be the case with any analog anchoring of forms in an old photograph. As an idea and as an object photographs have always spoken to, abutted and overlaid all other things which qualify as a photograph.

 

But now the process of production has accelerated to the point that their ghostly contemporary equivalents no longer stay still long enough to actually be looked at. The juddering informational flow of could-be photographs then bobs around in fat billowy invisible clouds waiting to be mined by aesthetes and commerce.

 

Intriguingly it may be that the human brain operates in a similarly arbitrary way, collecting a chain of momentary snapshots of the environments its associated body traipses through, then editing the compiled photo album later on. The concept of flow is one thing, our sensory capacity to experience it seamlessly may be something we delude ourselves into believing.

 

Now that various apps will edit down any backlog of randomly triggered and unseen images, then upload the ‘best quality’ ones for you the next logical development is to step away from any hands-on engagement with the process entirely.

 

Make a collage instead. After all there’s plenty of free material available through the internet. But let’s make sure the crap pictures have a secure future.


It may take a few hundred years to get around to looking at them. By then, they’ll look a lot more interesting than the buffed, polished and sharpened ones. And, hopefully, appear as gloriously heavy and untranslatable static snagging up the cogs of whatever mechanism tries to mangle them into passive inconsequentiality.