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Thrashing around London's Art scene during the 80’s, Dexter Dalwood painted a body of spatial landscapes that have me weak in the bathing suit area. The proceeding stolen images expose Dalwood’s vivid colour palette in which these dynaaamic spaces emerge, making me believe that he’s a little bit lusty
for Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud (and would totally make art babies with Echo Eggebrecht). His paintings encompass a documentary feel even though they act as archival records of non-existent spaces,
turning what we think we know into nothing but a stale fart. His celebrity references and
expressionistic style create the old fashion equation between pigment and
corporeality.
Dalwood (a graduate of both Royal Academy and St. Martins) paints in a manner
that many of us hermies aspire to; predominately flat, hints of tonal
modeling and sporadic “multimedia” muscle spasms that parade around on his canvases. These spasms, or collages, are seen as the engines to all of his works
and are very indicative of his educational background at St. Martins. His visual union between wonky perspectival
studies and static creativity remind me of pre-perspective, just-say-no-to-proper-proportions Italian paintings. In this compositional activity,
synchronicities become eminent and stand in as Dalwood's preferred pictorial tense.
Much like the time in which these canvases were painted, Dalwood’s accurate
representations, vivid colours and opposing perspectives are almost synonymous
for the existential extremes of the 80’s; disaster and promise, evil and
banality. Successfully for
Dalwood, these devices garnered the attention of some of the largest galleries
in the world, and also the affection of the w(b)itches through his uncanny
ability to paint cultural memory without nostalgia.
These thought-provoking compositions can be attached to the lineage of
abstract expressionism, pop art and more recently, “bad painting.” Although,
his works undertake the idea of the lived-in space, (space with the hints of
human intervention), the absence of figural representations in his work is
deliberate and sooo sassy!
Dalwood’s reasoning for this decision is not because he’s can’t paint the human
figure (*cough* me *cough*), but because he feels that it permits the viewer to identify themselves as the protagonist, thus, Dalwood forces the viewer to reminisce about how we connect to paintings
in the past and how they construct something that isn’t being depicted in the
painting…. there is more than what greets the eye, duh.
Dalwood’s paintings ignite
the imagination that seeps throughout all of us. And it is through the use of “bad painting” he forces the
viewer to re-appraise the intelligence of what we are looking at and what we
are thinking about according to the cultural context. Well, moving on, there
are few things we can learn from Dexter Dalwood: he tells us to always
brainstorm past the original idea so that we can push beyond the obvious,
something that isn’t illustrative. He also tells us to “Go Deep,” and he’s not
talking cock in vag / ass deep, he’s talking about the importance of getting
completely submerged into your art practice, your visual vocabulary and open
yourself up to chance, (something easier said in summer). He also suggests that we should never
be bombastic, instead, lets nudge our audience into a new realm of visual
discourse. Also, mix it up! Don’t
stagnate in one medium and try something different, like pee standing up (hey,
ladies!) or take a zumba class. In everything you do just let the art spill into the streets.
Kaleidoscope Magazine, Volume 8, fall 2010.
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