MYTH - MARC QUINN
Collateral event at the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Biennale of Venice
23th May - 27th September 2009
Installation around the city. Exhibition at Casa di Giulietta (Juliet's House)
MARC QUINN Starting Points for a Poetic Analysis
di Danilo Eccher
The Greek philosophers had already stressed the importance of language, not just on the level of communication but also on that of knowledge or, as it used to be understood, the truth. Virtuoso displays of rhetoric and the rigour of logic have completed this intellectual journey, bringing in the last century, with the establishment of linguistics, a new approach and a new consciousness to the analysis of language. It is obvious that this process has also had an effect on aesthetics, defining a new centrality of form that swept away mere technicality with ease. On the one hand, therefore, a whirlwind process of 'communication' was set in motion that has completely modified the approach to art, while on the other the choice of form has increasingly come to coincide with the indication of a thought, to the point of reducing the plane of meaning to that of composition. In Marc Quinn's case, it is the former aspect that is strengthened, i.e. an acceleration of the entire linguistic process in the sphere of communication, thereby giving rise to continual short-circuits of meaning and metaphorical games capable of disorienting the dynamics of knowledge or truth.
Thus new territories of investigation, new horizons for ever sharper and more curious eyes and new panoramas that abandon the familiarity of well-known paths to face the blaze of uncertainty and the darkness of doubt have established themselves. Gradually new subjects of unexpected stories have emerged, indefinite figures of a narrative that feeds continual dissolves between reality and appearance.
A territory between opposing forces, the terrain of an encounter between complementary and contrasting elements. Marc Quinn has chosen this territory to embark on his creative adventure, adopting a process that probes the cracks in a clash between light and darkness where black and white do not want to concede any possibility. In reality this research is like a sort of transparent curtain where indecipherable shapes appear, confused figures faintly perceived in the rush for an equivocal and ambiguous recitation. It is the emergence of a vaguely definable, uncertain narration: a slippery sort of narration that obscures its own plot in continual snags of interpretation. A parade of shadows among which the gaze loses itself in the pointless chase after a recognizability that is more than a promise. This frayed edge, this enveloping fog, this indefinable distance traces the outlines of the unreal landscape inhabited by his artistic poetics.
An apparently cruel, cold and detached poetics suspended in a narration that slowly works out its plot, that refines its linguistic contrasts, that stirs up the contradictions of an image which reveals the horror of contempt and, at the same time, the ecstasy of a sublime beauty.
If this represents the thematic horizon within which Marc Quinn pursues his research, beauty seems to testify to the essence of his formal code. Epiphany of colour, elegance of style and a gluttonous delight in the visual are aspects that are easy to discern in works like his 'flower paintings' - engaging, lively pictures, fascinating in their accumulation of colours and images.
A festive joy that alludes to a profound, dependable serenity, a familiar, syrupy happiness, a reassuring beauty where the eye wallows in a vision without risks and dangers. In reality they are works that show us the quiet smile of death, the plastic colours of appearance, stereotyped images of an empty poster art where a now cut-off nature clings to a frozen and silent presence.
The deceit of beauty is also the dream of a violated nature, modified and recomposed in accordance with an order and a harmony that are not afraid of revealing the trickery of their own image. The artist assumes responsibility for generating the appearance and, at the same time, revealing its duplicity, for showing us an indescribable beauty and exposing its monstrous mask. Once again the boundary, the edge, the impalpable curtain of a vaguely sensed but unattainable truth, the uncertain opacity of a vision that lets itself be attracted or repulsed by a gaudy image of which it is nevertheless able to capture the decided character. It is the intimation of a visual screen that distorts and exacerbates the gaze, that imposes jolts in the narrative, that plunges the figure into a sour and hallucinatory atmosphere of unreality.
The idea of beauty is often interwoven with symbolic elements and formal inventions that result in leaps in interpretation and linguistic surprises which are often unsuspected. This is the
case with works like Sphinx, where the complex research into the eccentricities of mediaeval iconography conducted by Baltru?aitis seems to re-emerge, where the interplay of lines and forms forces unnatural contortions onto the figure that liberate the imagination and venture into the realm of mystery. And yet the lunge into the visionary character of the mass image, into the visual codes of contemporary culture, its forms, its idols, is unchanged. The path taken by Marc Quinn seems cross-eyed: attentive to the course of current events but, at the same time, obsessively drawn to picking up every historical and cultured suggestion.
A controversial and complex process in which a discreet and sophisticated intellectual dimension coexists with one that is more hectically caught up in the rhythms of a bulimic contemporaneity. Thus the choice of Kate Moss as icon of an absolute harmony, symbol of an elegant beauty and pretext for surprising forays into symbolism is, at the same time, the image of a fortuitous popularity, of a fragmentary and transitory topicality.
On the one hand the symbolic mystery of an alchemical and enigmatic truth, on the other the force of a well-known, recognizable image, obvious in its familiarity. Marc Quinn's art accentuates the oscillation between the immediacy of a captivating and gripping account and the complexity of a contorted, thorny symbolism, terribly interwoven with the jolts of a toxic topicality. Marc Quinn's reaction is, once again, focused on the body of the language, on its grammar, on the essence of its vocabulary. Quinn establishes a particular rapport with the linguistic process: he does so by sinking his hands into its body, or by exposing its absence; by breathing in the dust of pigments and inks, as in the abandonment of a story that has only been outlined.
His studio is crammed with drawings, studies, sketches and plans. He does not seem to be willing to give up the role of the artist as faber, as builder. And in many works an external, distant manual ability does appear. It is an indecipherable oscillation, an apparent contradiction, a contentious enigma that goes beyond the more superficial technical plane to involve the entire creative process. It is not a matter just of responding to questions of handicraft, but of tackling practices that affect the most intimate motivations for making art. On the same plane also lies the question of the material and its subtle dance between the delicate whisper of a watercolour and the frightening roar of an organic support, between the familiarity of a reassuring classicism and the anguished doubt of a conscious drift. The faces of Marc Quinn's art are constantly mutating into the most incredible grimaces, putting on surprising masks, expressing the most secret feelings.
So the use of the most shocking materials and the renunciation of the act of painting are the other side of a research that caresses the classicism of drawing and weds the creativity of making. And yet what results is a harmonious art, fruit of a stylistic coherence that reinforces an intellectual solidity, a complex and varied formal language that never gives away the intricate literary construction that sustains it. An art in which language and meaning, form and thought are interwoven in a narrative that the images are not able to exhaust and hold in check.
Out of this complex perspective, following these bumpy tracks, comes Marc Quinn's exhibitionat the Casa di Giulietta in Verona: an unreal, fanciful place, where the 'myth' of Shakespeare's tragedy is mixed up with the everyday character of a dream of love, with a romantic illusion thatprompts thousands of young people to trace their messages on the walls of the courtyard in a spontaneous and uncontrolled form of art. Classical myth of Death and Love, of Rebellion and Family, of Deception and Purity but, at the same time, contemporary stumbling block of a mythology rooted in television and advertising, glittering in a known and knowing make-believe.
Symbols and narrations are mixed up and confused, tracing tortuous routes, preparing visual ambushes, mental snares of a risky intellectual action constantly on a knife-edge, poised precariously on the brink of the precipice. The borderline between the past and the present, between literary suggestion and contemporary superficiality, between poetry and symbol is also blurred. It is the enchantment of myth, its remoteness as well as its presence, its illusion as well as its relevance that captures the intensity of this language and suggests new emotions and new visions. The art of Marc Quinn, presented at the exhibition in Verona, is an extraordinary journey into the passions and pains, the loves and diseases, the joy in life and the enigmatic attitude towards death of a society that is still struggling to acknowledge its own feelings and its own fears, that still averts its gaze from its contradictions and from the depths of its own mistakes, that still buries its own poetry under the cynicism of a fake and plastic-coated reality.