Alex Dodd On show in Johannesburg
He thinks it was Andy Warhol who said it. Something like, if you can’t appreciate the beauty in a Coke can what’s the point of being alive right now? “You’ve got to be able to appreciate the beauty in the world around you – just the way it is,” says Ryan Arenson, his chunky Superman ring glinting in the light of the adjacent shop front.
Arenson is a mild-mannered man. He speaks mainly of beauty and finds many things “stunning” -Ea word in high circulation at the opening of his first solo exhibition at the Rembrandt van Rijn gallery on Sunday night. And quite an affair it was. No tacky box wine (“those boxes are ugly”), attention to detail, and more importantly to the spectacle – the show.
Everyone is held back at the front door to the Market Theatre until just the right moment. Upon entry we are confronted with a room full of blank backdrops, an empty ramp and a revolving disco ball sending speckles of red light across the arched ceiling. And then, in a sparkle of champagne and spotlights, the models enter wearing scanty black and spacey tin- foil.
But the clothes are the sideshow. It’s what they’re carrying that we’ve all come to see. These are things of great colour and brightness offsetting the models’ blank severity. At the end of the ramp the pretty young things pose, pout and install Arenson’s ultra-pop paintings against the big white walls. It’s all very New York. Trs “salon” darling.
Long before he began formally exploring his love of paint at the University of Witwatersrand’s school of fine art, Arenson was seduced by the glamour of magazines – those glossy, perfect images that offer little more than an ideal of beauty that instantly possesses the eye. The overt pun in his exhibition’s title, Child of the Cosmo/s, wittily encapsulates the painter’s fanciful, but far from thoughtless, immersion in pop culture.
Although he has clearly processed the idea that this kind of seduction might be essentially vacuous, the products of a plastic world presented an opportunity to use his beloved medium – “that mushy, messy stuff on the end of a brush” – to “elevate the exquisite”.
Arenson takes everyday icons that adorn billboards, comics, TV screens and magazine pages and uses paint in a highly disciplined fashion to delight in their universal qualities. Well, you might say, that’s nothing that hasn’t been done before and done again. Arenson has no problem with the idea of using a used-up world – he’s just keen on claiming the bits and pieces to exclaim, celebrate or ponder.
In his portrait of Princess Diana, To Di For, he has very consciously appropriated Keith Haring and Andy Warhol within the same image, claiming a part of this popular icon for himself.
In Asleep, a man lies at the base of a skyskaper cutting into a Hockney-esque sky. There is a recurrence of Superman and rockets, labels and fashion victims. In Japanese Pop, the ancient symmetry of Japanese line art takes on flavours of a digitised universe, mimicking the inner circuitry of a computer. Everything is simple and recognisable – like a menu at the Spur or a trip to Disney World.
But, thankfully, there’s a joke in all this copying of copies, a questioning and even a hint of sadness at the inescapable vacuity in all this colour and obsession with surfaces. Take for example the image of a man in a turquoise zoot suit holding up a pair of Airwalk trainers (Does God Really Care II). The colour-by-numbers effect makes his face appear as if it’s decaying – literally falling away. Too much clubbing? Too much rubbish? In Trinity I Obviously, the effect of light radiating from a CKOne perfume bottle very simply and effectively poses the idea that it might be sad to seek epiphanies in posey perfumes.
Arenson’s works are sprinkled with ever-so-subtle visual puns pointing to ironies or sadness. But that sadness doesn’t detract from the seduction of the scent or the image representing it.
“But doing a portrait of Gilbert and George in Gilbert and George’s signature style is pretty shameless, isn’t it?” asks a friend “They’re not even dead yet.” Shameless? I’m not so sure. To me the consciousness behind Arenson’s appropriation is redemptive. If the emperor is wearing no clothes, she’s shrieking about it.