Project Details
Tautologies
From: 2010-09-10 - To: 2010-10-03
Tautologies
Gorka Mohamed’ s Solo exhibition in Seoul, Korea
10 September 2010 – 3 October 2010
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Curated by Bright Treasure Ltd.
Collaborated with Gallery b’ONE
Supports and Sponsors: The Spanish Embassy in Korea, SEACEX, Lee & Yoon Associates
Venue: Gallery b’ONE (127-3 Hwa-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea)
Opening: 6 pm, 10 September 2010
Text by Raúl Zamudio
Gorka Mohamed: The Ground Zero of Painting
Gorka Mohamed’s painting is an impassioned endeavor concomitantly driven by critical irreverence. This dichotomy manifests in other registers as well: ciphered through myriad historical, formal and conceptual sieves, his aesthetic is a plethora of disparate sources that congeals into a vision uniquely and equivocally his own. If one looks at Automatons (2010), for example, there is a complex amalgamation of Phillip Guston and Jim Nutt in Mohamed’s pictorial sensibility that is ironic yet remains utterly faithful and committed. His palette nonetheless veers far away from both these artists in that his kaleidoscopic spectrum plays off itself like moons around a planet; his abutment of polychromatic flourishes in this work reveals exactitude and precision, and this tertiary complementation creates an optical buzz in the viewer that at first glance is not detected because of its sublime potency. Observe, for instance, the foundation for Automatons consisting of an ominous and muted battleship grey, which is then layered with a saturated palette whose retinal textures are far afield from the painting’s opaque background. Mohamed then layers this with a formal, variegated arsenal of painterly execution: passages of color field are interspersed with a more corporeal métier; squiggly lines morph into a calligraphic exuberance; and hue in one ostensible stroke is transformed before our very eyes from one value to its opposite. But though Mohamed’s practice is very attentive to what might reside solely in the field of pure abstraction it is, in fact, the visual poetics of an artist whose pictorial exploration resides in a liminal zone between non-representation and its other. Or, more to the point, his biomorphic forms exist between figuration and a kind of anti-figuration.
As a painter’s painter, Mohamed’s dialectic of figuration/anti-figuration would be too simplistic to describe as an anthropomorphism that oscillates to and fro its antithesis, i.e. non-representation. He uses line in the way that Chuck Close uses the fragment. In other words, Mohamed’s line and attendant amorphous configurations, whether in the form of controlled frenzy or much larger blocks of juxtaposed color, are aggregates of a larger pictorial gestalt. These formal tropes, which often are so expertly rendered as to appear by happenstance, are also the sine qua non of artists who may be called post-figurative.
The post-figurative can be defined as an art where the figure is superseded or subservient to something else; this x factor, moreover, is the figure’s doppelganger beside itself; it is figuration without a body, or the Deleuzean “body without organs.” Post-figurative is a particular style whose early painterly practitioners include Cecily Brown, Lisa Yuskavage, Jenny Saville, and John Currin to name a few who defiantly picked up easel and brush in the wake of the death of painting polemic espoused in the 1980s. These artists emphasize the figure yet supersede it to the degree that it is subservient to another concern that more often than not conceptual in orientation. Yuskavage, for instance, mines, among other things, the low brow, so-called “girly” magazines with her (in) famous images of objectified women. However absurdly overtop are the voluptuousness of her female forms they have nonetheless garnered both as many supporters as detractors. Her paintings of silicon Lolitas are the heirs of Manet’s Olympia (1863), in that they disrupt the male gaze via a politicized self-reflexivity. Jenny Saville, on the other hand, gives a whole different spin on testosterone fueled painters whose muscle is flexed on the surfaces of their works including Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon; and with Brown, her usurpation of Willem de Kooning’s females archetypes are given an estrogenic libidinal makeover. John Currin, too, has teetered figuration to the precipice of no return via his Mannerist excess bordering on the caricature. Gorka Mohamed has also tweaked figuration by way of Guston and Nutt, but also George Condo, and Albert Ohlen. This is very apparent in Painter(2010), for example.
Painter seduces with a kind of quaint demeanor of a Baroque gone awry. The title, which may allude to the depiction of an artist in full frontal fashion, is possibly Mohamed’s equivalent to Johannes Vermeer’s Allegory of Painting (c. 1666). The curtain that drops down from the middle foreground, the chair that in Vermeer’s painting is up front to the picture plane Mohamed has now seated his artist or alter ego. Mohamed’s surrogate eloquently peers at us dressed in velvet, lace, silk and cigarette in hand, like some kind of postmodern Burgher dandy meets Mr. Potato Head. Humor abounds in Mohamed’s artistic universe, but it is more Dante’s Divine Comedy with its hells than anything gratuitous or singular. In work after work Mohamed’s acute social commentary and his spin on the human condition are played out in a aesthetic laboratory that gives birth to a formal and conceptual Frankenstein: Intrusion (2010) is close to the urban machinations of Fernand Leger, or the Surrealist, psychosexual mechanics of Francis Picabia. There is no telling where Mohamed can take the practice of painting today and in the future. For he is not beholden or hostage to trends that marked painting of the last ten years with exhibitions and their vainly hopeful titles including "Painting: Division and Displacement" (2001), "Painting at the Edge of the World" (2001), and "Trouble Spot Painting" (2000).
Even in face of new media, which was another road travelled by painting in order to assert itself under its own conditions, there has been a future past where the medium of brush and easel incarnate anew into something wholly fresh and full of verve. It is this register where Mohamed’s art emanates from; it is a center with no circumference; or, if you will, an artistic practice forever protean and mutable yet returning to and voyaging from the ground zero of painting.
Raúl Zamudio*
New York City
* Raúl Zamudio is a New York based independent curator and critic. He has organized more than 60 exhibitions in the Americas, Europe and Asia; and he was co-curator, 2009 Beijing 798 Biennial; artistic director, 2008 Yeosu International Art Festival; co-curator, 2008 Media_City Seoul International Media Art Biennial; curatorial adviser, We Are Your Future, 2007 Moscow Biennial; invited to co-juror the 2007 and 2004 Cuenca Biennials; and co-curated an official collateral exhibition titled Poles, Apart, Poles Together for the 2005 Venice Biennial. As an art critic, he has authored over 200 texts published in books, encyclopedias, museum and gallery exhibition catalogs, magazines and journals, of which many have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. Some of the artists he has written essays on include Damien Hirst, Rebecca Horn, Lucio Fontana, Jesús Rafael Soto, Waltercio Caldas, Cildo Meireles, Santiago Sierra, Francis Alys, Lygia Clark, Helio Oiticica, Javier Téllez, Julio Galan, Ana Mendieta, Gabriel Orozco and Teresa Margolles.