'HEDGEHOG V ON HOLIDAY' by Richard Salmon
HEDGEHOG V ON HOLIDAY
Ferguson McDonald Gallery, London, 2000
by Richard Salmon
The notion that a painting’s strength could be derived from its tentativeness does not reflect a passion for fashionable contemporary painting or sculptural practice: the new 21st Century contemporary art collector seems to want, on the whole, a pictorial work that uses a formula based on the depiction of a certain corner of the world, for example the lobby of a hair conditioner and shampoo factory outside Paris, either made in a version that is freehand, supra-real and highly coloured, or one derived from forms of recent photographic processing which can inform the eye more comprehensively than the non-virtual ‘impressionist experience the eye would have if it were actually looking at the place itself. Or, in abstraction, a very motivated, hard-edge permission to define a kind of blown-up account of molecular interaction, produced in either an arbitrary, gestural manner or in a way that reproduces or reflects a formal, systems-based arrangement of patterns based on those of Nature. And in versions of sculptural practice, the reproducing of ’real’ three-dimensional scenes of a certain ‘reality’, often mindful of the human body or its needs; or ‘virtual’ accretions of materials that seek to look like hugely magnified molecular interactions.
Ignacio Valdes is an artist whose concerns appear to be far away from those market forces which may focus the direction of a young American or European.
Each painting is an act of personal affirmation, burdened, if that is the word, with the history of art: an awareness of what has gone before.
Valdes’ Hedgehog seems to be a well-travelled creature whose familiarity with the minutiae of existence in and around the sap of the earth has been expanded by an observation of man and his ways. I imagine this Hedgehog as a being as sentient as man, but one which has the intelligence to hold on to and maintain the humility which is its proper birthright. Its sentience could include the stories and lessons of ancient mythology (pictorial formality). Its humility allows an understanding that, in real life, the ways of nature do not allow for too much ‘originality’.
The originality of the Hedgehog lies in its ability to unmask the pretexts of humans who wish to see themselves or cast themselves in the image of God. Photographs, published daily on the sports pages, of a football crowd which forms the background of a striker kicking the ball into goal help us imagine the form that mankind might take in the eyes of this ‘Higher Power’: active, cellular, closely-packed, separate but connected, ‘independent’ in action and thought and feeling, but harnessed to the reality of what it is observing-in this example rising in a unison of joy or disappointment at the winning of a goal, and doing so in a kind of blur of subdued colour.
Ignacio Valdes’ work has matured over ten years, in my opinion, to the point of being able to take a look at the workings of this ‘cellular’ individual. Technically he is aided by his grounding as a sculptor who could observe Henry Moore’s plastic acceptance of a kind of modern man, sprung from the earth and made from some universal statement of form, with absolute clarity. Spiritually he is aided by an almost ferocious awareness of our mutability which impacts in the paintings as a refusal to objectify the individual beyond a proper pictorial vagueness: but a vagueness that knows only too well what the form that is depicted is up to.
What the forms in Valdes’ work are up to, it seems to me, is having or experiencing the thought or the feeling, or both, which precede action. Human action. Their construction is arbitrary but vehement.
Looking at the paintings in this exhibition, as an entirely personal example, the actions, or acts, predicated by the thoughts or feelings depicted within them would be as follows:
1 Proceeding 2 Becoming 3 Being 4 Planning 5 Imagining 6 Acting 7 Hoping 8 Worshipping 9 Celebrating 10 Waiting 11 Observing 12 Despairing 13 Understanding 14 Surrendering
15 Laughing 16 Accepting
If these images are predictive of action they embody the idea of the moment. This is well illustrated by a photograph of HEDGEHOG V ON HOLIDAY IX, on the easel in the artist’s London studio: the painting is red, squareish, and depicts a long neck with a rectangular face, with a mouth formed by decision, and two yellow eyes that burn out of the canvas at the space beyond-the space where action can be formulated. Seeing the painting thus, held in ‘real’ space, we can imagine the process which allows feeling or thought to become action: a kind of leaping, or springing, into an awareness of life and its infinite choices: the awareness which allows us to think of ourselves as real.
A second great British artist of our past century comes to mind at this point. Ignacio Valdes’ paintings owe a great debt to Francis Bacon. They can state this debt with as much emphasis as they do for this reason: they seem to be in tandem with Bacon’s vision, rather than simply following along with it. They seem to me to be a kind of non-specific or spiritual reading of a similar text. We may be lowly, or grounded in pain, or in a kind of reality that might be terrible to us, but inertia forces us onward to actions, however inadequate or ghastly, or imperfect, or, indeed, perfect-seeming they might be.
Finally, watching this artist’s work for several years has not persuaded me that the core of these paintings lies around anything more concentrated than a critique of power. It is fallibility, in all its glorious forms, which obsesses Valdes. What he gives us, in these paintings which contain so much very quiet electricity, is a confirmation of existence. That they are ground down to this so hard, and are so frequently successful, is a tribute to a voice which refuses to give up its right to claim that our essence as people -or hedgehogs- is our spiritual potential: closer perhaps to the stars and further from the gutter than sometimes, in our urgent but self-defeating need for confirmation of our own importance, we like to think.
Finis
© RICHARD SALMON, London, August 2001
Ferguson McDonald Gallery, London, 2000
by Richard Salmon
The notion that a painting’s strength could be derived from its tentativeness does not reflect a passion for fashionable contemporary painting or sculptural practice: the new 21st Century contemporary art collector seems to want, on the whole, a pictorial work that uses a formula based on the depiction of a certain corner of the world, for example the lobby of a hair conditioner and shampoo factory outside Paris, either made in a version that is freehand, supra-real and highly coloured, or one derived from forms of recent photographic processing which can inform the eye more comprehensively than the non-virtual ‘impressionist experience the eye would have if it were actually looking at the place itself. Or, in abstraction, a very motivated, hard-edge permission to define a kind of blown-up account of molecular interaction, produced in either an arbitrary, gestural manner or in a way that reproduces or reflects a formal, systems-based arrangement of patterns based on those of Nature. And in versions of sculptural practice, the reproducing of ’real’ three-dimensional scenes of a certain ‘reality’, often mindful of the human body or its needs; or ‘virtual’ accretions of materials that seek to look like hugely magnified molecular interactions.
Ignacio Valdes is an artist whose concerns appear to be far away from those market forces which may focus the direction of a young American or European.
Each painting is an act of personal affirmation, burdened, if that is the word, with the history of art: an awareness of what has gone before.
Valdes’ Hedgehog seems to be a well-travelled creature whose familiarity with the minutiae of existence in and around the sap of the earth has been expanded by an observation of man and his ways. I imagine this Hedgehog as a being as sentient as man, but one which has the intelligence to hold on to and maintain the humility which is its proper birthright. Its sentience could include the stories and lessons of ancient mythology (pictorial formality). Its humility allows an understanding that, in real life, the ways of nature do not allow for too much ‘originality’.
The originality of the Hedgehog lies in its ability to unmask the pretexts of humans who wish to see themselves or cast themselves in the image of God. Photographs, published daily on the sports pages, of a football crowd which forms the background of a striker kicking the ball into goal help us imagine the form that mankind might take in the eyes of this ‘Higher Power’: active, cellular, closely-packed, separate but connected, ‘independent’ in action and thought and feeling, but harnessed to the reality of what it is observing-in this example rising in a unison of joy or disappointment at the winning of a goal, and doing so in a kind of blur of subdued colour.
Ignacio Valdes’ work has matured over ten years, in my opinion, to the point of being able to take a look at the workings of this ‘cellular’ individual. Technically he is aided by his grounding as a sculptor who could observe Henry Moore’s plastic acceptance of a kind of modern man, sprung from the earth and made from some universal statement of form, with absolute clarity. Spiritually he is aided by an almost ferocious awareness of our mutability which impacts in the paintings as a refusal to objectify the individual beyond a proper pictorial vagueness: but a vagueness that knows only too well what the form that is depicted is up to.
What the forms in Valdes’ work are up to, it seems to me, is having or experiencing the thought or the feeling, or both, which precede action. Human action. Their construction is arbitrary but vehement.
Looking at the paintings in this exhibition, as an entirely personal example, the actions, or acts, predicated by the thoughts or feelings depicted within them would be as follows:
1 Proceeding 2 Becoming 3 Being 4 Planning 5 Imagining 6 Acting 7 Hoping 8 Worshipping 9 Celebrating 10 Waiting 11 Observing 12 Despairing 13 Understanding 14 Surrendering
15 Laughing 16 Accepting
If these images are predictive of action they embody the idea of the moment. This is well illustrated by a photograph of HEDGEHOG V ON HOLIDAY IX, on the easel in the artist’s London studio: the painting is red, squareish, and depicts a long neck with a rectangular face, with a mouth formed by decision, and two yellow eyes that burn out of the canvas at the space beyond-the space where action can be formulated. Seeing the painting thus, held in ‘real’ space, we can imagine the process which allows feeling or thought to become action: a kind of leaping, or springing, into an awareness of life and its infinite choices: the awareness which allows us to think of ourselves as real.
A second great British artist of our past century comes to mind at this point. Ignacio Valdes’ paintings owe a great debt to Francis Bacon. They can state this debt with as much emphasis as they do for this reason: they seem to be in tandem with Bacon’s vision, rather than simply following along with it. They seem to me to be a kind of non-specific or spiritual reading of a similar text. We may be lowly, or grounded in pain, or in a kind of reality that might be terrible to us, but inertia forces us onward to actions, however inadequate or ghastly, or imperfect, or, indeed, perfect-seeming they might be.
Finally, watching this artist’s work for several years has not persuaded me that the core of these paintings lies around anything more concentrated than a critique of power. It is fallibility, in all its glorious forms, which obsesses Valdes. What he gives us, in these paintings which contain so much very quiet electricity, is a confirmation of existence. That they are ground down to this so hard, and are so frequently successful, is a tribute to a voice which refuses to give up its right to claim that our essence as people -or hedgehogs- is our spiritual potential: closer perhaps to the stars and further from the gutter than sometimes, in our urgent but self-defeating need for confirmation of our own importance, we like to think.
Finis
© RICHARD SALMON, London, August 2001