Andrew Salgado DIRTY LINEN (& The Nihilist’s Alphabet) · 2018-03-01 · Andrew Salgado DIRTY LINEN (& The Nihilist’s Alphabet) 1 2. ... harkening back to ideas Salgado 3

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Andrew Salgado

Andrew SalgadoDIRTY LINEN (& The Nihilist’s Alphabet)

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Foreword

Andrew Salgado has had 12 consecutive, sold-out international exhibitions, including London, New York, Mi-ami, and most recently – a tour-de-force 2017 exhibition featuring video, furniture, and sculpture in a trans-formed 13,000ft former military base turned art gallery in Zagreb, Croatia. Earlier in 2017 he was the youngest artist ever to receive the honour of a survey exhibition at The Gallery of the Canadian High Commission in the heart of London’s Trafalgar Square. Now, the London-based Andrew Salgado’s returns to Cape Town with a show to debut at The Cape Town Art Fair and thereafter relocate to Christopher Moller Gallery.

Salgado’s newest output, entitled Dirty Linen / The Nihilist’s Alphabet, presents two different but interrelated bodies of work: Dirty Linen consists of 10 paintings that are – for the first time in his burgeoning career - all executed on linen support. But the title also suggest, rather wryly, the act of ‘airing one’s dirty laundry’ – a colloquialism for an over-sharing of secrets, but as Salgado assures us, with his maturation as a man and an artist, he is becoming less of an autobiographer, keen to remove his own intention from the work; a way for Salgado to ‘share less’, in order to allow the viewer to come to their own conclusions. Despite their sugary, saccharine veneer, the work seems to keep viewers at a distance, simultaneously inviting but also deflecting the viewer. Always one to play emotive tricks, Salgado seems more self-aware of his ability to play with the viewer’s emotions. In Talisman, the lead image from the exhibition, Salgado has found a sort-of visual meto-nym for his practice as a whole. He states: There is an ideology that to ‘go forward’, one must go back. I first painted Sandro like this in early 2016, with the plastic dollar store rose, and I love the image because it invites while it refuses: simultaneously wholly Romantic but absolutely ironic – and I view my whole practice like that. For Dirty Linen, he is Grand Marshall, leading this motley pageant - and he provided that proverbial ‘lightbulb’ moment, dictating the ambience and feel for the whole body of work: I went to the moodboard with words like chocolate, dirt, Willy Wonka, and technicolor. We see an immediate polarisation – a linkage of opposites: what appears so glaringly gleeful is actually rather menacing – with those perennially arched Luciferian eyebrows, he appears like a fever dream, the tragically charismatic villain: like the Chesire Cat, whose sharpened grin glints like diamonds.

The adjacent Nihilist’s Alphabet further compounds these ideals, consists of 20 works on paper that seem to weave, wander, and interlace many of the concepts seen in the paintings with a cruder, more immediate approach, and certainly the viewer is compelled to find such connections as though drawing circles on a word-map. One sees how the subject in the two drawings, Castle and Young Price, recurs as the culminating painting in the beastly and triumphant Take This Pleasure, a piece that Salgado refers to as inhabiting an “overtly, self-conscious gleefulness… a beastliness.” Again, there appears to be a paradox between the utopian or hallucinatory, versus the nihilistic conceptualism or almost serpentine darkness that imbues the works. This is an artist who based his 2016 exhibition on the death of 55 persons at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando earlier that year, also discussing darker aspects of humanity, including Xenophobia and racial inequality. Conceptually, if the works do not stray too far from the themes he has become known for, harkening back to ideas Salgado

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explored previously in shows like The Misanthrope or This is Not the Way to Disneyland, they operate more covertly. The intentions are less obvious. And Salgado is less-inclined to discuss them: shying from his previ-ous penchant for autobiographical, highly personalized work, Salgado seems (at least ostensibly) to turn his sights outward here, looking to external and formal elements for inspiration or guidance. “The title explicitly references the materiality. For now, that was enough…” He states. “This desire to grow up, and out, of my own solipsistic realm has been nagging at me for some time. I wanted these to be more about my base materials, and specifically how my marks felt on the surface, and how they were presented in an environment. I didn’t want this work to be about me.”

If prioritizing the technique and format is his preference, he has occupied that role with zeal: Salgado con-tinuously pushes the technical dimensions of his work, utilizing a broad array of techniques, approaches, and styles that not only keep each work fresh and unexpected, but that are also uncommon in figurative painting. Yet, Salgado insists the works are ‘boiled down’, focusing on a simplicity of media after a show last year saw the artist hand-stitching 2.5m paintings, making a sofa, and installing an artificial beach with an 8m projection of the ocean. For Dirty Linen, the artist exhibits a desire to retreat, pull back, whittle things down, and focus on presentation. Despite the apparent chaos on display, there is restraint, there exists an order – one might even say a ‘method to the madness’.

Viewed together, both bodies of work function beautifully as one grandiose statement: the color, the mark-mak-ing, the ideologies presented between both bodies of work house wonderful connections for the viewer to elaborate upon – and while the drawings find their organization in a large grid, and suggest a desire for for-malism and order that leads to the paintings, wherein one painting connects – figuratively but also very literally – to its neighbour. This structure is also reiterated in the shaped canvases: Accidental Sainthood’s clever trickery is at once optical, lyrical, and architectural. “The show is like a big convoluted play that unfolds in acts.” Sal-gado states: “too many characters; too many connections. It’s all a bit Tarantino… but intention and execution are one and the same. They unfold naturally and causally in the same way they unfold in the studio, but I leap back and forth in time, sort of like Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse V. So these polka dots might find their way back to an earlier chapter. If a painting is extracted from the procession, the entire presentation becomes unstable; the story falls apart.” These finite linkages result in a system of codes and (what he calls) hieroglyphs that tie one painting to the next, allowing one story to flow onto its successor, and the entire system of codes, motifs, colours, and techniques play out across the paintings like a foreign language to be deciphered. “Yes you can read deeper into the work, and certainly these meanings are there under the surface, but I no longer have the desire to pander to these explanations. A, B, C, D, E, F, G... blah blah blah. I like the idea that your input is probably more exciting than my own. Listening to me talk becomes so tedious. I feel more like, here’s a torch, there’s the cave, go explore.” - Kurt Beers, Director, Beers London Gallery

Dirty Linen / The Nihilist’s Alphabet runs at Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town, until March 24, 2018.

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In a storm. The view disintegrates, painting happens. - Simon Schama

In Hang-Ups, Simon Schama’s collected essays on painting, he reminds us that life is not art. While these realms are certainly linked, if not indissoluble, what matters most is the realisation that art possesses its own animus – Its own spirit, mind, and feeling. Latin in derivation, animus also suggests a certain malevolence or animosity. It is therefore because of the animus that possesses painting as a condition and an action that Scha-ma bluntly declares: ‘Never confuse life with art’, even though ‘the temptation is strong’. In the case of Andrew Salgado, a painter whose very life seems to drench and consume his canvases, Schama’s caution becomes all the more pressing. For while the artist’s lived experience has certainly played a profound role in a given paint-ing’s incarnation, we must remember that this folding of life and art – life as art – fails to satisfactorily address the singularity of the artist’s mark-making, or the aesthetic force of his painterly signature. Hence Schama’s pithy summation – the view disintegrates, painting happens. In looking at a Salgado painting something simi-lar occurs. One sees a human figure, often reduced to a bust, and imagines who and what that person may be feeling or thinking. This occurs, becomes possible, because of the artist’s empathic strength. However, this sen-sation of connectedness masks a more ominous realisation that a void exists between the artist and his figure, between the viewer and the seen. This is not because the artist consciously refuses the sublimity of a human connection, but because he intimates – in his everyday life and in the act of painting – that such a connection is not quite possible. This disconnect will be elaborated upon, for now, however, it is not only the psychological void, or rift, that concerns me, but, in-and-through painting, the artist’s visceral and material expression of that rift. For it is in the very pathos factored into the act of painting itself that the artist most profoundly conveys his personal story, and, more significantly, the story of paint. Schama captures the fraught nature of the artist’s quest, through paint, thus:

… art, like memory, is never truly solid … and seldom free of melancholy ambiguity, for it presupposes the elu-siveness, if not the outright disappearance, of its subject. Its deepest urge is to trap fugitive vision and passing sensation – elation, horror, meditative calm, desire, pathos – the feelings we have when we experience life most intensely, before routine, time and distance dull the shock, and veil the memory. This craving to nail down transient experience is an unassuageable craving, as basic to us as the self-pitying sorrow for our own mor-tality, and just as invariably doomed to disappointment.

Schama’s probing reflection cannily mirrors Salgado’s understanding not only of life, but of art. Both realms, while connected, are also torn apart. Art is and is not life. Both realms are haunted by the realisation that noth-ing can be fixed and rendered immutable. Rather, the very desire for intensity – the desire to desire – is an act which will not, finally, be fulfilled, except in the fleeting moment. Salgado’s paintings, for me, are the magnetic traces of this inconsolable and unassuageable desire. For there is nothing passive, or quiet, or resolved in these

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works. Indeed, a tumult seems to consume the canvases, a tempest, that is not only the sum of the artist’s in-satiable-yet-fraught desire, but the very sum of the painting’s visceral material. For Salgado seeks not only to express the deep structure of his mind and heart, but the deep structure of paint itself.

‘The strongest art is the work that is frankest about its artifice, its failure, finally to duplicate the world’, notes Schama. This remark may seem paradoxical, but this is only the case if one assumes the role of art to be mimetic – that is, consciously and morally desirous to mimic what we imagine to be objectively perceptible. But what if there can be no objective insight? No truly verifiable lens? What if it is precisely one’s subjectivity that scuppers any attempt to construct an Absolute? If this is so –and I believe it is – then what we are left with, what we cannot escape, is the fragile partiality of our vision. Therein – in our ceaselessly compromised singularity – lies our strength. In Salgado’s case, however, it is not only the fact that the artist refuses to conceal the materiality of his paintings that matters, but the existential core that underpins this refusal. For Salgado, I’d venture, profoundly recognises the fallacy of mimicry and the fugitive nature of human understanding and feeling. His paintings are a dramatization of this failed-yet-strong realisation. All the more significantly, however, the genius of the artist resides in the painterly execution of this realisation, for Salgado’s paintings are not only ciphers for some existential exegesis but passionately declamatory expressions, in the heat of the moment, on the impossibility of being a human being and the impossibility of being an artist. The Irish play-wright, Samuel Beckett, famously summarised this existential tension that haunts the best among our artists – Ever tried. Everfailed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. The best art, therefore, excoriatingly reveals the inescapability of failure; it is art which, in the failing, reveals the truth of our unceasingly compromised and fragile being. It is this failure – as the very truth of great art – which Salgado presents us with. What follows is an attempt to come to grips with the artist’s ‘craving to nail down’ the transient nature of perception and experience in-and-through painting. In so doing I seek not only to present a psychological portrait of the artist but to understand the workings of that psychology in the very act of painting itself. For if the best artists are not merely technicians it is because they are ableto conjure that life through the passionate embrace and exercise of their craft. Disintegration, I argue, is at the root of the experience and drive that compels Salgado. It is the breaking moment when painting happens that this disintegration – psychological, moral, and aesthetic – as-sumes its greatest yet mostfallible strength.

‘I’m a prairie boy. Northern lights and pink sunsets, that kind of thing. I’ve hung on to that’. – Andrew Salgado in conversation with Tony Godfrey.

To my knowledge no one has grasped the profound connection of a particular geography – the Canadian prairie – to Salgado’s vision and practice. This is understandable, given that Salgado is a painter of human beings, of the human condition, and not a painter of landscapes. And yet it is the very particularity of the prairie with its vast unending plain and infinitely daunting sky which has shaped the way in which Salgado puts a painting together then blows it apart. For the prairie, as a world and a trope, refuses any closure, any point from which one can control or mediate the world. Quite literally, it is the vastness of this great plain that makes it impossible to hone any intact and substantive sense of self and place in the world. Rather, psy-

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chologically-emotionally-physically the prairie amplifies precisely the ‘fugitive vision and passing sensation’ which Schama sees as critical not only to the best art, but to life itself – an art and a life in which nothing is ever ‘truly solid’. The novelist, Willa Cather, has provided one of the most archetypal depictions of the prairie in My Antonia:

As I looked about me, I felt that the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds, when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

After Cather, we can no longer think of the vast wine-stained plain without also thinking of a storm-tossed ocean, or a tumultuous engulfing sky, for in this world sea and sky and land are aquiver with motion. It is this very restlessness – a restlessness of plain and sky – which psychologically and aesthetically informs the paint-ings by Salgado, ‘a prairie boy’ born and raised in Regina, Saskatchewan. Just as one cannot separate the writing of Emily Bronte from the blasted storm-tossed English moor, similarly one cannot separate Salgado from defining Canadian geography. To understand Salgado’s paintings, therefore, one must see the boy in the man, for the prairie’s wine-drenched land and sky – which for Cather also evokes the boundless ocean – is not only a matter of unbounded space but a matter of mind, heart, and soul. The tempest lies within the artist. Splatters and drips. Wild brushstrokes, contrasting colour scraped, sprayed and flung: Andrew Salga-do’s work is a celebration of paint. The images are built up in a flurry of mark-making. Salgado works to the point of defining shapes and then stops. His subjects materialise in a blur of energy. They are men, similar to Salgado in age. Their eyes and the curving shadows that define their faces and fingers are visual resting points in a storm of paint.

Margaret Bessai’s canny reading returns us to the excoriated core of Salgado’s art, for his canvases are not so much layered as flayed; a skin at once precariously intact yet stripped, the better to reach a gnashing raw-ness of soul. His figures are not self-possessed, contained, or resolved; they hover between worlds, as though caught in some purgatorial limbo. This is because the artist’s vision of humankind is abridged and compro-mised at every turn. And it is the rawness of a painting’s execution which proves the surest cipher for the artist’s unsettlement. If his figures emerge ‘in a blur of energy’, if they are caught in a flurry-splatter-drip-scrape, this is because cognitively-existentially-viscerally his figures evoke our anguished mortality. It is not surprising, therefore, that it is to Francis Bacon to whom Salgado defers. It is Bacon who, for Salgado, has harnessed our greatest human truth; a truth which traditional portraiture had largely failed to capture. As Sebastian Smee notes in The Art of Rivalry, what Bacon realised was that ‘it was precisely the inability to know, to truly pin down character, motive, feeling, or social status … that soon became’ Bacon’s defining premise. ‘Through a combination of chance and high emotion – fury, frustration, despair – [Bacon] saw himself unlocking “valves of sensation”. But he also described feelings of hopelessness as he painted’. Here we find ourselves returning to the intractability of failure at the root of art-making. The influence of Bacon on Salgado is psychological and technical. As Bacon desperately and passionately bemoans, he would ‘just take paint and just do almost anything to get out of the formula of making a kind of illustrative image’. He further states that his flight from any ‘illustrative image’ impelled him to rub and scratch out any discernible yet reductive form, ‘to try to break the willed articulation of the image, so that the image will grow, as it were, spontaneously and within its own

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structure’. Salgado, after Bacon, must therefore refuse the notion of a being defined by a caste, creed, or type. Unhomed, orphaned, cast adrift, Salgado’s figures – primarily young men – operate as ‘doppelgangers’ for the artist’s own exiled state. However, a key difference between Bacon and Salgado turns on their respective temperaments, for while Bacon’s vision is unerringly bleak, Salgado’s hovers between some founding abyss and a yearning to recover some engendering beauty. It is telling, therefore, that when reflecting upon the prairie, that the artist turns not to Bacon but to Doig, in whose paintings he finds a ‘magic realism’. For Salga-do, therefore, it is not enough simply to deconstruct, or peel, or strip the human figure of its perceptible social, cultural, or political qualities. Rather, this negation also requires the artist to recover something inscrutable, inviolably pure, magically real. If mimicry is a failed enterprise, it does not follow that art must merely negate that aspiration. The greater quest, for Salgado, is to find within the fleeting structure of a given painting some magical glue. For it is not only the daunting vastness of the prairie which inspires and compels the artist, but its mystery. The vividness of Salgado’s palette owes much to the impenetrable mystique of the Northern lights which he remembers from his boyhood.

‘The focus is not only on the depiction of psychological states. But also on the extreme rapidity with which the states can sometimes alter, like the shadows of clouds passing over a summer cornfield’– Edward Lucie-Smith

It may seem that Lucie-Smith is speaking of John Constable whose ‘onrushing clouds’, as Schama describes it, ‘will exit from his pictures as swiftly as they enter but for the instant the cloudcatcher has bagged them’. But it is in fact Salgado’s paintings which he is addressing. Lucie-Smith therefore underscores my view that for Sal-gado the indefinable human figure – the psychogeography of that figure – is indissolubly linked to the artist’s place of birth. In Salgado’s case, however, the landscape is anything but temperate. We are not dealing with ‘the shadows of clouds passing over a summer cornfield’ but with a tempest on the run, a ravenous tornado. In splicing psychology, geography, and paint, David Liss captures the prevailing mood in Salgado’s work more accurately, stating that the ‘surfaces’ of Salgado’s paintings are ‘alive and theatrical. Vigorous painterly gestures, enlivened compositions, and buoyant flourishes of colour only barely cloak a darker psychic disso-nance as he grapples with the brutal realities of our mortal existence’. So, while Salgado, like Bacon, might seek some organising structure, the works are fundamentally fallible and anarchic. Their impact stems from the artist’s fusion of psychology and paint – and, the wrenching of that fusion. The ‘psychic dissonance’ which Liss recognises in a Salgado painting resides not only in its inscrutable depth but in its ‘surfaces’, in the grit and viscera of paint. If Salgado, like Bacon, refuses the ‘illustrative image’, it is because that which engages him far more is the spectre rather than the substance, the ghost rather than the man. His figures conjure a rogue personhood that eludes understanding. The jury is certainly out as to just how dark or how illumined Salgado’s paintings are. Is the artist truly as misanthropic as he, on occasion, claims to be? ‘While his work is not entirely pessimistic, it certainly presents a view of life and memory as more dystopian than utopian’, Liss declares. Psychologically perhaps. Stylistically, however, I’m not so certain, for I would argue that the artist’s ‘psychic dissonance’ is fundamentally enabling. Salgado’s darkness is a spur. His refusal to close down a painting is his grace. His recognition of a founding void – a recognition first intuited upon a great prairie plain – is the root of his truth.

In conversation Salgado describes himself as ‘a romantic and a nihilist’. In truth these states or orientations

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are not mutually exclusive, though many may suppose them so. Passion can be triumphal and apocalyptic. If Salgado regards himself as ‘a misanthrope’, then, in a Wildean fashion, he is a ‘tongue-in-cheek misanthrope’. If he is ‘sincere’, he also enjoys ‘poking fun’. Indeed, as Salgado tells me, he elects, always, ‘to believe in both sides’ rather than reside in ‘the gutter between’. If so, it is because of the artist’s fear of ambivalence and equivocation. Instead, like the geography and sky that birthed him, Salgado elects a more capacious and starker vision. His is an encompassing world. His is a life embraced un all its complexity and unfinishedness.The artist’s description of why and how he paints further emphasises this inclusiveness. His recent painting, un-der the heading Dirty Linen, wills this raw exposure. The works are ‘candy coloured’, he says, but they are also ‘crude and gritty’, ‘dark and moody’. After all, ‘bubblegum is sinister’. This darkly saccharine vision differs mark-edly from Bacon. It would seem, therefore, that in this cycle of paintings at least, Salgado has refused the claw of night that has consistently stalked him. One matter, however, remains moot – one cannot shirk the screech-drip-scratch-flood and plosive that is paint.

‘Not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence’ – Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

A painting while framed, is never bound. An object, while seen, slips the bonds of sight. A man, gazing upon another, in love, is never wholly certain of love’s return. At the root of apprehension lies fallibility. At the heart of desire there is madness. A painting begins as the world disintegrates. If Salgado’s paintings of people – first photographed, largely known in passing – are love songs, then they are love songs consumed by an unwa-vering and inconsolable yearning. For the beauty of Salgado’s paintings – a beauty fractured in an electrified passing moment – never segues fluently into some final becalming truth. To understand this root psychic discord is to understand a man inescapably caught in flux. The root of this discord, as I’ve argued, resides in the artist’s inherited weather and place. However, it is a discord that also stems from a particular painterly genre or tradi-tion – the baroque. Edward Lucie-Smith recognises this core influence when he declares Frans Hals and the lat-er Rembrandt as precursors. My point, however, is that this baroque sensibility is one which Salgado inherited at the very outset of his life, for it is this very sensibility which the artist absorbed on confronting a boundless prairie, a world consumed by infinitudes, impossible to cordon off, or bind to oneself, a world that shatters all resolve, all resolution. In Hals and the later Rembrandt, Lucie-Smith finds a ‘virtuosi … use of paint’, a ‘life and movement’ caught ‘through often very loose handling of their material’. It is this very looseness, which allows Salgado, af-ter Margaret Bessai, to ‘materialise in a blur of energy … a storm of paint’. For his paintings are electrified, as though ripped through by lightning. Therein lies their baroque quality, therein a style damned by lovers of the Renaissance – precisely because Salgado refuses to assert a defining core at the heart of a painting. Today it is precisely this style of art, devoid of an abiding core, a centrifuge, which is once again resuming ascendance. This is because the baroque – a style exaggerated and frantically urgent – best mirrors the psychology of our age. For the baroque resists ballast and proportion; it hurtles outward into a nameless void – unafraid. Daring, risk-filled, what drives the baroque is not only a painterly virtuosity but a realisation that meaning, or rather Meaning, does not exist. There is no final arbiter, no final point of mediation. Rather, meaning now finds itself scattered, like space-junk, in a void. From the very outset, it is this void which Salgado intimated. The rapidly growing interest in his paintings derives from this root realisation that we are all floundering, untethered, adrift.In Beyond Good and Evil Friedrich Nietzsche, ever prophetic, warned us of the inescapable lure of the void. As

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a famous aphorism reads,

‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into a abyss, the abyss also gazes into you’. It is this abyss which defined the baroque, and why it was scorned. Its return as a shaping aesthetic and psychology is telling. However, if Andrew Salgado’s paintings exemplify this condition it is not solely because of the abiding pessimism which fuels it. For shot through Salgado’s abyssal psychic realm is a light that comes from a distant north; a light mercurial, magical, drawn from a great distance and a great depth, a light – astonished at itself at the core of human existence. Selected bibliographySalgado, Andrew, Ten, London: BEERS, 2016.Schama, Simon, Hang-Ups: Essays on painting (mostly), London: Random House, 2004. Smee, Sebastian, The Art of Rivalry, London: Profile Books, 2017.

Ashraf Jamal is a teacher in the Media Studies Programme at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and a research associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg. He is the co-author of Art in South Africa: The Future Present, the co-editor of Indian Ocean Studies, and the author of Predicaments of culture in South Africa, Love themes for the wilderness, and the award winning short fiction, The Shades. In 2017 he published In the World with Skira.

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“Rainbow drops - suck them and you can spit in six different colours.”

- Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

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Oil & oil pastel on linen works

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Talisman (Born Losers)

“There is an ideology that to ‘go forward’, one must go back. I first painted fellow artist Sandro Kopp like this in early 2016 - who in some ways I see as a sort of ‘stand-in’ or doppelgänger for my own presence - with the plastic dollar store rose, and I love the image because it invites while it refuses: simultaneously wholly Romantic but absolutely ironic – and I view my whole practice like that: I’m both tongue-in-cheek and also paradoxically totally sincere. For Dirty Linen, this figure returns as Grand Marshall, leading this motley pageant - and he provided that proverbial ‘lightbulb’ moment, dictating the ambience and feel for the whole body of work: I went to the moodboard with words like chocolate, dirt, Willy Wonka, and technicolor. That inspired the exhibition as a whole, a darkness coated with a rainbow façade. We see an immediate polarisation – a linkage of opposites: what appears so glaringly gleeful is actually rather menacing – with those peren-nially arched Luciferian eyebrows, he appears like a fever dream, the tragically charismatic villain: like the Chesire Cat, whose sharpened grin glints like diamonds”.

“The ‘born losers’ bit comes from a Canadian singer, Matthew Good, he’s been around since I was, like thirteen years old. Its all angst and pathos - but in a kind of grandiose, verbose style of Springsteen-style rock ‘n’ roll. Its tragic, but beautiful. This song, “Born Losers” has this wonderful bridge - “go put it in the ground / go bury it somewhere it can’t be found” - I think quite consciously as a nod to REM’s ‘Shiny Happy People’ which I always saw as being a really sad song: how can anything so uppity and euphoric not be read ironically? I mean, of course this song is tongue in cheek. Its manic. Its almost violent in its glee. But anyhow, I think Good references Michael Stipe when he sings “Throw your love around, love me, love me/ Take it into town, happy, happy / Put it in the ground where the flowers grow”. This idea of taking something precious, like a gem, and burying it somewhere safe... for yourself, to protect yourself, like a talisman... so, you see, I think thats where we start cultivating the beginnings of this body of work. Precious shimmering gems - like our selves - that we put in the dirt to try to keep safe forever”. - Andrew Salgado.

Oil & oil pastel on linen, 170 x 140 cm (67 x 55 inches)

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Painting for Heartsick Lovers (Begin Again)

“I was going through a strange place. It seemed a lot of people I knew were in that same state of limbo as well. I think it has something to do with the cycle of the new moon; something circadian, where we flush the toxicity from ourselves. Maybe this is why he looks ‘back’ instead of ‘forward’, but I don’t know. There was an understated tragedy to this little figure, like a Neil Young song, and I offered him as something of a sacrifice for a new lunar cycle”. - Andrew Salgado.


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Cape Town Villa

“I saw the arches arise here behind his head like a sunrise coming through architecture. He is commensurately positive, a foil to PFHL before him. And that blinding cadmium red is a colour that I have used before to represent the dawn. So perhaps he is a shift toward something outwardly happier, a tangible feeling of release. I had visions of the Ocean behind him...if you listen you can hear it. There’s a peace here”. - Andrew Salgado.


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Accidental Sainthood

“Alessio came in and we played around in the studio; some subjects bring in such a spontaneous energy that beautiful things start to happen. There were these metal chains dangling from my ceiling from where I used to hang the ‘recto-ver-so’ paintings from the Croatia show in 2017, and he strung himself up as though wound in some medieval torture device. I saw this all-too familiar idea of shackling, and caught up there like a modern-day St Sebastian - vulnerable before the onslaught of arrows - I knew we had a winning pose. I love this idea of leading the viewer to see something that plays tricks with their cognitive recognition. These are archetypes, visual tropes, and our brain recognizes them. We’re talking about a history of painting that was at one point reserved for solely religious iconography, so we subconsciously go there, to a religious space. So visually I castrate the viewer by truncating the canvas: everything leads up to those hands, and they’re severed, removed from view. But the painting is like a game of ‘snakes and ladders’, our focus always wandering to that upper portion; so the subject is almost an afterthought. I toss a ball into the air and hope it lands. Without hands he is endlessly, cruelly left searching for something forever unattainable. He has this Romantic beauty - almost too much so, and I like subverting that. Its kind of a cruel game to punish the most beautiful, right?”. - Andrew Salgado


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Diamond Mine

“Despite the seemingly politicized stance this painting takes, ‘an obscured black subject paired with the title’, it is actually not a reference to blood diamonds, but rather titled after an album by King Creosote and Jon Hopkins. The painting in-troduces the second act of the show, a sort of confusion before a lifting, that segues into the following piece. In that sense he’s meant as a kind of placeholder in the same manner that Intermission breaks the intensity of the works. I like stream-ers, I like party decorations; they’ve made their way into works since 2015. For me, if the previous works house a sort of coldness, these begin to warm up. This painting wants to feel like that album sounds. I tend to do that a lot. Someone said that makes me a synesthete; I see blue when I hear that album”. - Andrew Salgado.


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Whisper When You Hear It

“He’s the warmest piece. He’s a comforting, zen-like presence, with an inverted rainbow rising behind him. These rather trite sunbeams comes back again and again here, its sort of like a subversion of happiness. The subject, Zia, came into my studio and started doing flips and hanging upside down from the rafters. I wanted to express this surge of delight. He was nearly called ‘Soothing’ after the Laura Marling song, where she says: “Oh, my hopeless wanderer / You can’t come in / You don’t live here anymore / Oh, some creepy conjurer / Who touched the rim / Whose hands are in the door”. But he really found his voice in a similarly titled song by the band Spoon. So like these two songs paired side by side, there’s a paradox - a freneticism between the two, like a spark ready to burst: he’s pacified but also ready to burst at the seams. He was the most challenging piece for me to complete, so I had to tap into his rhythmic beat and find that heart. I think this rhythm is mimicked in the shaped canvas that follows the diagonal blue line from Accidental Sainthood and pushes your eye to Sasha in MASTERPIECE. In the story, he’s more antihero; not quite a jester... again with that Chesire Cat. In the Spoon song the line goes “Wait, is that too maudlin? / I’m just looking for some sign of life / I know you must hold secrets”. I should pretend its all inspired by Romantic literature, and yes, a lot of it is, but in reality I’m grooving to these songs all day long and they find their way through my ears to the tips of my fingers - and eventually, onto the canvas”. - Andrew Salgado.


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Intermission (Temporary Shrine)

“I like the idea of temporary shrines. Lighting incense, burning candles. Passageways. There are suggestions to this idea in every show but I think I’m running with it now. Arches, walkways, paths to oceans. Journeys. Seasides. Calm. Sunrise. Breathe. Release”. - Andrew Salgado.


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Masterpiece

“This is titled after a song by Big Thief. I struggled to title her; the reference to Dutch Masters (for me at least) was there, but ‘Amsterdam’ made her seem like a prostitute. ‘Theatre’ a bit too ‘on the nose’. I kept listening to those raucous opening chords and the line “years, days, makes no difference to me babe” and so I just went with it. As the only woman in the show she has to be really dominant, and I struggle with making women too coquettish. And with the strong reference to these regal portraits throughout the centuries, Sun Kings and the like, there’s a real intentional theatricality. I went to see a Tal R show and wanted to capture that offensive glaring red. She’s quite punchy - I think stuck between all these men she really demands attention. There is literally a curtain call coming down on her. At one point she was going to be called Lollipop and have a literal circular canvas sticking out her top. Still might do that by the time you read this. When is enough enough, right? I see a bubblegum machine there, in the corner”. - Andrew Salgado.


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Take This Pleasure

“He’s about excess. There’s a beastliness to him. I wanted to hone that and imprison him through this self-conscious gleefulness. There’s a sinister aspect to the over(t)ly joyful, no? I kind of cherry-picked all these wonderful bits from the paintings before him and threw it all together at him and crossed my fingers and then my eyes and hoped it would work.”. - Andrew Salgado.


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Various Stages of Worship

“In Classical art there are only, like, 12 recognized hand positions, each referencing a different spiritual state. Forgive the pun, but hands carry a lot of historical baggage, and like faces, say a lot about a person. I enjoy painting hands, and challenge myself to reduce them to these chunky or scribbly and suggestive blocks of colour. I think this might be Alessio’s hand from ‘Accidental Sainthood”. - Andrew Salgado.


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My scars were reflecting in the mist of your headlights. I looked like a neon zebra shaking rain off her stripes.

- Fiona Apple, Anything We Want.

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Works on paper

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Young Prince

Mixed media on paper, 57 x 38 cm (22 x 15 inches)

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Truthhurts


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Castle


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Bitter Artist


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Beachcomber (Night)


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Mercury


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Summer of Love


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Summer of Love II


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St Sebastian


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Silhouette


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Garlands (After Rousseau)


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Accidental Flowers (Alessio wears...)


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Bunting


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Loverboy


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Dark Rainbow


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Return to Oz


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Language Barrier


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Golden Age


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Coco


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Blue Still Life


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Exhibitions2013

‘THE SMALLEST HEART’S DESIRE’2nd January to 2nd February 2013Ottawa, Canada

Harvey Nichols Commission27th March to 31st December 2013Harvey Nichols, Knightsbridge, London

‘The Acquaintance’9th October to 22nd November 2013Art Gallery of Regina - Regina, Canada

2014

‘ENJOY THE SILENCE’30th January to 20th February 2014Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

‘VARIATIONS ON A THEME’1st May to 6th June 2014One Art Space, New York City, NY

‘Storytelling’26th September to 31st December 2014Beers Contemporary, London UK

2015

‘WARRIORS’2nd January to 1st February 2015Christopher Moller Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

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‘THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO DISNEYLAND’15th June to 20th June 2015Volta Basel

‘THE FANTASY OF REPRESENTATION’ (GROUP EXHIBITION CURATED BY ANDREW SALGADO)30th July to 19th September 2015Beers London

‘A QUIET MAN’3rd December to 8th December 2015Pulse MIAMI BEACH, Art Basel Week, Miami, Florida.

2016

‘The Fool Makes a Joke at Midnight’7th May to 28th May 2016@Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY, 103 Norfolk St. (Lower Eastside)

‘The Snake’11th November to 17th December 2016@ BEERS London, 1 Baldwin Street, London, UK, EC1V 9NU

2017

‘TEN: a survey exhibition’12th January to 28th February 2017The Gallery of the Canadian High Commission in London

‘A ROOM WITH A VIEW OF THE OCEAN’28th June to 20th August 2017@ Lauba Art House, Zagreb Croatia

2018

‘DIRTY LINEN & THE NIHILIST’S ALPHABET’16th February to 24th March 2018The Cape Town Art Fair & Christopher Moller Gallery

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ADDRESSChristopher Moller Gallery

7 Kloofnek Road Gardens

Cape Town South Africa

8001

CONTACT #Tel: +27 (0) 21 422 1599Fax: +27 (0) 86 611 3871

[email protected]

WEBSITEwww.christophermollerart.co.za

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Christopher Moller Gallery

Documents

Andrew Salgado DIRTY LINEN (& The Nihilist’s Alphabet) · 2018-03-01 · Andrew Salgado DIRTY LINEN (& The Nihilist’s Alphabet) 1 2. ... harkening back to ideas Salgado 3