Royal West of England Academy in Bristol - RWA
Posted on: 17 Mar 2014All the exhibitions you can visit these days at the Royal West of England Academy, in Bristol, are funded on the concept of duality. This idea structures itself throughout sections like Portraits, where the focus on the relationship between the artist and the model is dominant, and like Actors and Artifice (available till 23rd March), a work from the University of Bristol Theatre Collection. Actors and Artifice offers a prospect upon the Golden Age of Hollywood, moving from the faces of the main actors of that time. The overview includes stars like Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, Liz Taylor, Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Buster Keaton and Shirley Temple.
But the concept of duality gets even more important when we look at the select group of paintings, pictures and sculptures that compose the Oneself as Another section (Curated by bo.lee project and available till 26th March). This exposition, whose title maybe refers to the famous sentence “Je est un autre” (Self is Other) included in the book in A Season in Hell by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, brings together a select group of painters, photographers and sculptors whose works force the viewer to confront true human imperfections with the ideal encouraged by media and society. At the same time these fourteen artists overtake this idea showing to the visitors images of illness, disfigurement and freak characters to remind that everyone can run the risk to become like that, one day. This show, in a hall of mirrors with media, forces us to recognize that we are constantly making subconscious comparison of each other, with an idealized image that no one wishes to acknowledge and that no one will totally achieve.
The erotic and stunning women-dolls, in silver gelatin hand printed, are the code of Bob Carlos Clarke, a great prolific and provocateur artist who committed suicide in 2006. His Infanta Electronica and Lorraine paintings, with their high heels, synthetic and rubber skin, are a comment on society’s portrayal of women as objects. The male answer to this provocation may be the sculpture of Narcissus by Cathy Lewis. With his jeans, tattoos and the stereotyped pose, he doesn’t remind very much the character of the Greek myth (Narcissus was a hunter, renowned for his beauty which will lead him to death), but is more similar to a model by Yves Saint Laurent or Gucci. In this way, even the essential candor and naivety of the original subject is replaced by the consciousness of being a model of beauty. Carrying on our visit, we realize we can’t take the eyes off the faces of Edo and Jerry, the intense colored portraits taken from the Stolen Faces series by Johann Andersson. The huge paintings are fists in every viewers stomach. These characters, whose eyes, mouth and cheeks are surrounded by orbits and deep scars, are the nearest representation of the society’s not-included individual. Maybe this bedazzlement is the reason why Johan Andersson is the youngest artist to be shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award and was named as one of the Independent newspaper’s Top Twenty Artists of 2008. Strangeness is the key word to define Sarah Ball’s paintings. The dilated pupils and vacant expressions give to her subject the capacity to tell their stories.
Like Cathy Lewis, Francis Bacon’s Triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, is a painting inspired by classic Greek literature. This triptych, like the most famous Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, has been realized in the darkest period of his life, after the suicide of his lover George Dyer, in 1971. In Bacon’s works people are color spots, shades and ghostly presences plunged in spaces full of symbols.
But the most impressive piece is Jone Roucquoi’s Sanctae – a Portrait of Secular Saints. The full-size photographed women, arranged in circle around the room, are all gold-haloed, but many of them are the antithesis of the traditional iconography. They are icons of individual women, each strongly marked by their corporal experience and whose flaws are all showed and perhaps emphasized. Roucquoi exposes their flesh, reveals sexual organs and put them beside religious imagery. There are women of never born children and girls whose breast, ovaries and every biological sign of womanhood has been removed. But in this sanctuary all of them (and all of us) can be what she really is without shame, exposing aspects that society repudiates.
By Ilenia Appicciafuoco for 365Bristol