Gorka Mohamed
05 May - 10 Jun 2011
GORKA MOHAMED
Riendo Hacia Atrás
5 May - 10 June, 2011
The work of Gorka Mohamed does not sit easily in any particular time or context, but if it did, it would be somewhere between Goya’s Doña Josefa and Felix the Cat, comprising still lifes, amorphous forms, serious cartoons and organic geometries. These descriptions move around the artificial world of painting, an extravagant and enigmatic world in which each painting suggests many themes while remaining just out of our reach.
Each of the compositions that constitutes the paintings in the exhibition is positioned in front of a flat horizon, devoid of landscape features, like a Brechtian theatre set. This background tinges the figures with artificiality as though the hand of a ventriloquist were the only force that might be able to move them. In front of this perfect, dreamlike scenery everything is possible. Each of the portraits is silent but has an infinite power of suggestion. In this silence we find the painter, that romantic artist, ridiculous and decadent, frivolous and aristocratic. But then, aren’t we all?Mohamed laughs at himself, at the role of the artist as transformer of a Society of the Spectacle in which you are not allowed to do anything, because, just as in theatre, nothing really exists. The only way to act is from within the spectacle itself, through the pop icons, turning them sad and defenceless, distorting them, using a dark palette that distances them from the stridency of mass culture. Against all the arrogance of the artistic scene, that Debordian Hyperreality that swallows everything, the works of Mohamed are modest; they represent the contemporary individual shrunken in size, surrounded by an aggressive and superficial environment in which any creative effort is in vain. Not even the Old Masters escape being turned into postcards.
Mohamed certainly pays tribute to old techniques and pictorial genres, especially Spanish Baroque, a moment in time characterized by the artist as “attractive for what it has that is rough and deep, austere and strangely hallucinated”. It is this perfection and stylistic subtlety that Mohamed aims to represent through contemporary popular culture, creating compositions through different layers and references, through free association of images and a clear bi-dimensional character. Travelling back in time we find ourselves taken to the 30’s and 40’s. René Magritte went through his Période Vache, moving away from surrealism with a cruder, faster and more aggressive style inspired by popular sources like cartoons and caricatures. We might also be brought to reflect on the polymorphous perversity used by both the Surrealists and the pioneers of animation like Max Fleischer, in which each figure moves to the rhythms of Cab Calloway’s big band swing.
Civil guards, Ionic columns, olives, cakes, haunting eyes. In front of these opaque figures and objects, the single textual and objective clue open to us lies in the title, a statement both disturbing and absurd many times over that brings to mind Surrealist writing, in which title and representation have an arbitrary and whimsical relationship, as well as being a wink to Ceci n’est pas une pipe and the absurd belief that we should believe what we are seeing. There are many overlapping levels of humour in each of his works: the comical situation of the classic silent films; and a more pessimistic one that uses more subtle techniques such as allusion, the absurd and satire. From the Baroque dramas to the anxiety of Beckett and Artaud, the work of Mohamed expresses the feeling that we are laughing to keep ourselves from crying, the generalized anxiety arising from the vulnerability of the modern individual.
Gorka Mohamed (Santander, 1978) lives and works in London. He studied Painting at Goldsmiths, University of London and at the Escuela Massana of Barcelona. His most recent exhibitions include: Tautologies Galeria b’ONE (Seoul, Korea, 2010), Toon Toon, Galería Siboney (Santander, 2010), Ventriloquist, Timothy Taylor Gallery (London, 2009) and Planes Futuros (curated by Lorena and María del Corral) at Sala Baluarte (Pamplona, 2007). He has recently been selected for the Creekside Open Award (London) by the artist Dexter Dalwood.
-Rosa Lleó-
Riendo Hacia Atrás
5 May - 10 June, 2011
The work of Gorka Mohamed does not sit easily in any particular time or context, but if it did, it would be somewhere between Goya’s Doña Josefa and Felix the Cat, comprising still lifes, amorphous forms, serious cartoons and organic geometries. These descriptions move around the artificial world of painting, an extravagant and enigmatic world in which each painting suggests many themes while remaining just out of our reach.
Each of the compositions that constitutes the paintings in the exhibition is positioned in front of a flat horizon, devoid of landscape features, like a Brechtian theatre set. This background tinges the figures with artificiality as though the hand of a ventriloquist were the only force that might be able to move them. In front of this perfect, dreamlike scenery everything is possible. Each of the portraits is silent but has an infinite power of suggestion. In this silence we find the painter, that romantic artist, ridiculous and decadent, frivolous and aristocratic. But then, aren’t we all?Mohamed laughs at himself, at the role of the artist as transformer of a Society of the Spectacle in which you are not allowed to do anything, because, just as in theatre, nothing really exists. The only way to act is from within the spectacle itself, through the pop icons, turning them sad and defenceless, distorting them, using a dark palette that distances them from the stridency of mass culture. Against all the arrogance of the artistic scene, that Debordian Hyperreality that swallows everything, the works of Mohamed are modest; they represent the contemporary individual shrunken in size, surrounded by an aggressive and superficial environment in which any creative effort is in vain. Not even the Old Masters escape being turned into postcards.
Mohamed certainly pays tribute to old techniques and pictorial genres, especially Spanish Baroque, a moment in time characterized by the artist as “attractive for what it has that is rough and deep, austere and strangely hallucinated”. It is this perfection and stylistic subtlety that Mohamed aims to represent through contemporary popular culture, creating compositions through different layers and references, through free association of images and a clear bi-dimensional character. Travelling back in time we find ourselves taken to the 30’s and 40’s. René Magritte went through his Période Vache, moving away from surrealism with a cruder, faster and more aggressive style inspired by popular sources like cartoons and caricatures. We might also be brought to reflect on the polymorphous perversity used by both the Surrealists and the pioneers of animation like Max Fleischer, in which each figure moves to the rhythms of Cab Calloway’s big band swing.
Civil guards, Ionic columns, olives, cakes, haunting eyes. In front of these opaque figures and objects, the single textual and objective clue open to us lies in the title, a statement both disturbing and absurd many times over that brings to mind Surrealist writing, in which title and representation have an arbitrary and whimsical relationship, as well as being a wink to Ceci n’est pas une pipe and the absurd belief that we should believe what we are seeing. There are many overlapping levels of humour in each of his works: the comical situation of the classic silent films; and a more pessimistic one that uses more subtle techniques such as allusion, the absurd and satire. From the Baroque dramas to the anxiety of Beckett and Artaud, the work of Mohamed expresses the feeling that we are laughing to keep ourselves from crying, the generalized anxiety arising from the vulnerability of the modern individual.
Gorka Mohamed (Santander, 1978) lives and works in London. He studied Painting at Goldsmiths, University of London and at the Escuela Massana of Barcelona. His most recent exhibitions include: Tautologies Galeria b’ONE (Seoul, Korea, 2010), Toon Toon, Galería Siboney (Santander, 2010), Ventriloquist, Timothy Taylor Gallery (London, 2009) and Planes Futuros (curated by Lorena and María del Corral) at Sala Baluarte (Pamplona, 2007). He has recently been selected for the Creekside Open Award (London) by the artist Dexter Dalwood.
-Rosa Lleó-