Clean Skins
Vegas gallery is pleased to present new works by the British and French artist Greg Rook. As a contemporary figurative painter, Rook enjoys playing with the relationship between form and function, popular culture and art history: he uses an allegorical iconography and a hyperrealist style, referencing directly to art history, while his subjects and sources are often from the cinema, mainly American and the Wild West fantasy. The cowboys become a metaphor for the painter, both as moral heroes and as idealised romantics.
In this instance, the setups often show an idyllic nature, where cowboys are busy killing or skinning animals, tinted by the beautiful and romantic colours of early Technicolor cinema, evoking old films such as The Wizard of Oz or Gone With The Wind. The mise-en-scene is also cinematographic, borrowing the close-up, man-camera or circumnavigation techniques; giving a rhythm to the narrative. Yet with Clean Skins, which refers both to the counter-terrorist vocabulary and the idea of bare canvas, the utopian vision and idealisation of the wilderness life, presented in his previous series, has morphed into a more dramatic post-apocalyptic vision; mirrored in his use of the canvas and the paint.
Most of the works presented here are an allegory of fatherhood and manhood, where our hero asks himself: as a man, would I be able to protect my family and provide them the essential basics needed to survive in the case of a catastrophic scenario? In fear of the future, and of our inadequacy, we tend to look back at the past in the search for answers or advice, as well as role models. In this instance, the American dream of the early settlers is seducing: discovering new territories, a wild nature, men executing precise tasks with essential meanings, based on a system of strong moral and religious beliefs…etc. Yet, the cynicism of a European, added to the real and scary fundamentalist character of the early settlers, seems to crack at the surface.
We are endlessly drawn into the paintings, or illusionistic spaces, before being thrust back onto the surface, through the addition of elements that suddenly reveal very clearly and honestly the nature of the constructed image: the use of different drawing techniques, the different glazes applied on the canvas, or the blank areas left purposely. As a result, the paintings have both fantastical and delusional qualities, so romantic and romanticised that they feel artificial, even kitsch. They are meant to be both window and shutter, a lie that dares to tell the truth. They involve an aesthetic of artifice rather than of nature, by “quoting” imagery to make conceptual points.
If cinema and hyperrealist painting have illusionistic and believable qualities, in order to mirror reality, they also have the intrinsic delusion of something magical. In the light of the real world, the cinematographic romance is slowly dying, like a Dead Sea Fruit: something that appears to be beautiful or full of promise but is in reality nothing but illusion and disappointment.
At the end, Rook merely wishes to construct a world in which he can paint; and maybe live.
Greg Rook graduated from Goldsmith College in 2002. Since then he has exhibited throughout Europe, America and Asia in both Solo and Group exhibitions. Recent exhibitions have included solo shows at Lounge Gallery-London and Gallery Min Min-Tokyo. In 2010 Greg Rook will be presenting a solo project with The David Roberts Art Foundation in Camden.
© Melanie Moreau 2009