Losing Face: George Morton-Clark

We are all victims of rape. 

Whether crucified for our religion, race – our mental proficiency or our physical imperfections – we all suffer under the gauntlet of a normative, mediatised culture where happiness is defined in terms of exclusion and status. To quote the artist George Morton-Clark,

Society has evolved a paranoid state of mind because of our ever-tightening freedoms.

In less polite words, a violence is perpetrated against all of us; our freedom violated every day as we find ourselves choking defencelessly on the fumes of advertiser bullshit, corrupting our nervous system and rewiring it to produce a deformed image of how we should look in the frame of a 21st century society. 

With Morton-Clark, I imagine witnessing a hysterical obliteration of the human form, like a timebomb has finally detonated under the searing schizophrenic pressures we bear in our day-to-day existence. What we have left are disconnected, discarded remnants of being – unintelligible and uncoordinated elements that no longer offer real meaning. The human figure has been aggressively deconstructed and reconstructed into an attractive mess of nothingness and absurdity - and yet these works deliver such wholesome truths.

His female subjects thus provide a metaphor for the products and objectified images of reality that deserve to be ruined and mutilated. There's an interesting, homophonic collision between 'porn' and 'pawn' here: we are essentially all puppets that have been duped, manipulated, misguided; quite simply lied to in a pornographic culture where women, amongst many other things, are packaged into salacious commodities which promise everything but deliver nothing. 

To violate our freedom is perhaps one of the most serious crimes against our humanity. Morton-Clark reacts with work which is highly evocative and emotional. We have been cruelly tamed into a way of thinking, and the only way to reacquire freedom is to bite back with all we have left: savage revenge; degenerate, animalistic anarchy in the face of misplaced glossy Chanel logos.  Our only hope is to rape the system that has raped humanity.

We are immersed in a world of sin, a limitless hell on earth where anything goes, like a society that has been necessarily reset to its raw default settings. All barriers are broken; we have faceless pigs looming over equally faceless and maimed women, portraits of women gagging on the artist's most graphic tint of vermilion. This is not the glorification of human mutilation. It is the necessary destruction of those illusions of beauty churned out by a consumer monster that are anything but attainable.

But what's even more unsettling here is the almost cartoonish feel to the mutilation, like an old episode from the Itchy & Scratchy Show - you laugh but you do so with a seed of discomfort, no matter how hilarious the antics. It's as if these paintings have been unconsciously created by a child who’s discovered Crayola for the first time and has proceeded to make an uncensored mess. Of course, it's a well-thought out and beautifully crafted mess by Mr. M-C, but the aesthetic nonetheless - and rather brilliantly - hints at a disturbing landscape for the future generations.

The innocence (dare I say cuteness) conjured by this way of working is of course undercut with the artist's aggressive mark-making. Through his raw use of collaging, the faces of his subjects often tend to have smiles plastered onto them, a nice touch which inevitably echoes our own indoctrination in a society which conditions us to act against our will and instincts. Elsewhere, GMC's faces are scratched out, destroyed - or his heads missing entirely.  We lose face, quite literally.

Check him out at: 

http://www.gm-c.co.uk/

Chloe Early: 9/11 in Disney Land

Now, in the normal way I would copy every other overzealously polite blogger and apologise for my delay in posting new material. No; I haven't been recently hospitalised and no, I haven't been occupied by a family bereavement. In any case, what I have to show you next is worth the wait. If you're like me and have an insatiable appetite for bittersweet art, then I present you with 9/11 debris decorated in a lush Garden of Eden:

At least that's what I see. Mind-fuck? And what a great one. The artist behind the brutal chaos is Chloe Early who, according to her blog, quite plainly and innocently "Paints Pictures". Clearly not as innocent as she professes. Early works with disconcerting yet gripping juxtapositions: exuberant and abundant nature framed by harsh and suspiciously posited airplane engines - callously discarded and reassembled in the aftermath of a mysterious tragedy. 

Everywhere you look there's an explosion of bold colour that suggests life and vitality and liberation, but it's always muddied by an undercurrent of violence bubbling beneath the surface, or by a triad of missiles delicately descending at the bottom of the artist's canvas. So while at first sight you may imagine Early's suspended figures to be falling in blissful oblivion, there's a more troubling ambiguity here. 

Her central subjects - of which there is usually a pair - seem frozen in time and space, locked in some dream-like fantasy which anaesthetises them to the barbarity inflicted upon them. As mentioned, these airplane turbines almost take on a new, diabolic identity in Early's contrived arrangement of them, as if to echo the sick trivialisation of tragedies like 9/11 by manic pop references in the media.

Early's religious undertones here are clear, but if these landscapes are indeed alluding to a spiritual realm, the question I ask myself is: Where are these figures going? Are they angels falling or ascending to Heaven? Are they infinitely and indefinitely spinning in space? Or perhaps they are being exhibited in the most explicit sense: innocent victims falling from an obliterated aircraft...

There are certainly sniffs of Micallef's 'Disney Torture Porn' aesthetic here (research it if you think I've coined that term out of clinical pervertedness). It's that concoction of flowery lightheartedness bled with the fumes of a morbid utopia that works so well. It transmits doubt into the viewer's eye; tips the prospect of escapism into a nihilistic post-apocalyptic world (and vice versa). 

Early is a master of decontextualising and recontextualising iconography, with a keen eye for subverting images of celebration; we have Micky Mouse mingled with bullet shells laced with roses, patterning a memorial that evokes the insanity of war's warped realities. In fact, in their ordered presentation and arrangement, these pieces have the seductive scent of glossy magazine covers, as if beneath the chaos lurks a subtly packaged symphony of false ideals.

Wake up and smell the debris.

http://chloeearly.com/

http://chloepaintspictures.wordpress.com/
http://www.stolenspace.com/

Alexis Marcou: Slippery Illustrator

Let’s face it: in the context of art that’s ‘cool’, a plain portrait is boring. The unfortunate reality is that there are too many other people out there who are capable of doing exactly what you can do. Something else has to be happening. 

Over the past year, I have experimented – simply through pursuing a creative 'mistake’ I once made – with geometrical lines of distorted light. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but I’ve spotted a peculiar pattern recently with illustrators/artists (Agnes Cecille, Carne Griffiths) playing with aesthetics that replicate shattered glass, cubism and bewitching light reflections. Is there any particular reason for this trend, apart from the fact that it looks effing radical? 

And I'll tell you why this kind of style is so important today. As you’ve probably detected from my attitude towards the cretinous use of Photoshop, artists appear to be fighting back with work that defies Adobe’s determined mission to make pencils - indeed humans themselves – obsolete. Whatever you can do, I can do better.

Alexis Marcou is an inspiring saviour who makes our craft still worth persevering. His work is clearly the product of blood, sweat, and a shit load of graphite. Marcou uses an intriguing juxtaposition in his work: the monochrome becomes activated by the most minimalist traces of colour, suspending his figures between frozen stasis and explosive chaos. 

My favourite piece of his has to be ‘Noire’ (first image) though I’m sure that comes as no surprise to those of you who know his work. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s the wet-look about the piece which gets me most – and before you whine that it’s just a quick photoshop job – head over to his Process page to be proved firmly wrong. 

Such a simple image, yet that fluidity about it delivers a selection of mysterious interpretations: Is the figure frozen in time/death? Crying in the pouring rain? Drenched in blood? Marcou’s obsession with lines renders his work with a highly contemporary and virtual feel, playful with dimensions so that his finished pieces offer multiple zones of vision. Marcou's perspectives have reached vertiginous heights with commissions already from both Nike and HP.

Marcou encourages aspiring artists, "Create your own unique style. When working for clients listen but don't compromise your style." Take note - I'm currently designing a poster for a BBC film, and throughout the entire process I've been plagued with paranoia that I'm wasting my time because I'm still creating in a way which will guarantee my own aesthetic satisfaction above anyone else's. That's not selfish, right?

I'm holding you responsible, Marcou.

http://alexismarcou.com/ 

Urbane Urban: Byroglyphics

Byroglyphics. A pseudonym so incurably urban I can just taste the grit grind inside my mouth. Russ Mills, the man behind the mask, exceeds the label 'artist'. He has that kind of ungodly talent; you know, the sort that will disillusion any budding painter into depression and bring them to the sensible conclusion: Give up. Yeah, that kind. This guy is someone who actually deserves the traditionally pretentious appraisal that an artist's work "transcends" something. Because Mills does.  

The fact is, Mills is like this untouchable, fully autonomous, self-commodified brand. He has a unique aesthetic identity which you could spot a mile off in the hazy mist of teeming aerosol-wielding graffiti artists. When I discovered that his work is a fusion of fine art with photography and digital experiments, I breathed a sigh of relief: I got some solace in the reassurance that Mills was indeed human like the rest of us.

That said, it's all still bloody staggering stuff. With the nauseating reality of Photoshop appearing to take over the world as we know it, Mills has responded with a sophisticated, even elegant style that appeases the best of both worlds without totally conceding to the superficial one. His artistic skill is firmly in tact, not compromised by the "need" for, or reliance on image manipulating software; it rather functions as a polishing tool to make his finished pieces look coma-inducingly good.

On a personal note, I'm obsessed with his distorted, manic arrangement (do I spy an oxymoron?) of lines in his portraits. At first sight you may wonder whether this is just a quick mishmash of paint, but look closer and these are expertly handled, beautifully explosive "painting disasters", to quote Mills himself - the kind of 'good accidents' we crave as artists.

The trick with Mills is that his work alludes to many elements: not just fine art, but photography, illustration, graphic art, promotion, and beyond. Mills has a colossal army of followers, and it's no surprise why. He's got it all: purity of skill and digital capabiltiies that would make him thrive in pretty much any creative environment - not that I can see him working for Saatchi & Saatchi any time soon.

Mills is currently selling a bunch of signed Summer Salts prints on his website, at prices so reasonable I might actually be able to fork out the cheddar for one. 

Time to watch some Photoshop tutorials.

http://www.byroglyphics.com/