PEELED REALITY
“To live is to leave traces” W. BenjaminIn his latest series of paintings, The Peeled Stickers, Guy Shoham transforms the canvas into a wood-laminate look-alike wardrobe doors or drawers with remnants of stickers, some of them peeled or faded. Now discarded to the storage room, once those pieces of furniture served as a ‘canvas’ for decorating a child’s or an adolescent’s room with stickers that defined the dreams, aspirations and identity of an individual. These fragmented remnants of youth emerge from the cobwebs of the viewer’s faded memory evoking buried feelings of hope, joy and frustration that are part of growing up.
This ‘damage’ to the furniture seems like a juvenile act of rebellion against the conventional aesthetic and established values. However, the desire to assert one’s individuality and rejection of the old often happens by following the current trends and fashions, so, perversely, is an act of conforming at the same time. By using mass-produced stickers it echoes the desire to belong and to fit in. It is a “ready-made identity”.
In their hyperrealism the paintings deceive us into believing that we are faced with real objects. Like birds that pecked on Zeuxis’ painting, fooled to believe that the depicted grapes were real, so we are fooled into believing that the stickers are real and resist a temptation to peel them or to pull the handles of the drawers.
“All art and literature are imitation” according to Aristotle. Guy’s art however is an imitation of the imitation. By imitating wood veneer, which itself is an imitation of the real thing, Guy taps into the kitsch aesthetic so prevalent amongst the middle classes. By imitating mass produced wood-laminate furniture and the stickers that represent popular culture at the time, Guy reverses the role of art by using it to imitate kitsch. Kitsch, a product of Western industrialization, cheap, mass produced, machine-made, “digests art for easy consumption”(Greenberg), so mass-produced stickers used on the laminate furniture can be viewed as a “digested individuality”.
Guy exposes how the ready-made aesthetic has infiltrated our culture, our tastes, fashions and aspirations and how by using it we fool ourselves into believing that we are individuals. But as “superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations”(Greenberg) then we, when facing it, exposed with all our imperfections , feel more real then ever.