Review of the week: Brenda Atkinson
The Goodman Gallery’s new year triple billing is headed by Mimmo Paladino’s Carte Siciliane, a set of 12 new works etched on handmade paper.
Paladino first came to the attention of Europe’s artworld in the late Seventies with a series of drawings, after which he moved on to painting and sculpture, and then into printmaking, retaining painting as a part of his print works.
It’s difficult, one imagines, to escape the sheer weight and duration of Italian history and art history. The burden of both seems to hang heavily. Like many Italian artists producing for a contemporary market, Paladino’s visual language is occupied more with the concerns of Modernist predecessors like Brancusi, Giacometti and Beuys – and with the ghosts of “civilisation” – than with more properly contemporary themes and styles.
His works engage ancient, archetypal and elemental themes, and are constructed through fragmented presentation and painstaking technical execution.
In Carte Siciliane, Paladino takes the figurative focus of his recent sculptures and breaks them up further: hands are etched into delicate paper blocks which are themselves set into thick, crude handmade paper “frames”, most cut out in crude profile. Leaves, faces, fingers and glistening scarab beetles impeccably embedded in the rough paper recall ancient Egyptian civilisations as well as the frozen historical moment of Pompeii’s ashen collapse.
The relation to history that is suggested, and occasionally fractured by (more interesting) impressions of intimacy, is more poetic than political; underlined by a style that sits oddly aside the work of postmodernism’s children.
UK-based Gillian Ayres’s riotously coloured abstract etchings are similarly opaque. Ayres has a strong international track record and was commended for her work on the 1989 Turner Prize, but with titles like Tipsy Dance, Limelight, and Myrrh of Marib, these works set one’s teeth on edge, despite their technical cleverness.
As the second supporting act on the show, William Kentridge stands black hat, head, and bare shoulders above his two contemporaries. While I was initially doubtful about the possible merit of his new Encyclopaedia Drawings, seeing this selection confirmed – if confirmation was needed – that Kentridge knows exactly what he’s doing.
Not that this is fresh territory: it’s vintage Kentridge moving into slightly different terrain. The encyclopaedia in question is an old Larousse dictionary, its torn and mounted pages marked by the figure of the artist, nude and behatted. Titled according to the first and last entries on the selected pages, the works suggest the artist’s own bemusement at a career confronting the term “fame”.
In Transigible-Travail, the Kentridge figure sits astride a gym horse. In the background we are told, in French, that “transigible” means “something that can be the object of a transaction”, while “travail” (labour) is “the use of energy that creates fatigue”. On other pages Kentridge incorporates the original line drawings of the dictionary into his own fugitive landscapes and figurative cameos, creating image-texts that are riddled with innuendo and irony.
Kentridge’s vernacular marks the private and public as realms traversed by uncertainties and absurdities, bringing history into the present in a distinctive – and undeniably potent – contemporary form.
Mimmo Paladino, Gillian Ayres, William Kentridge on at the Goodman Gallery until February 20