Press Release
| HUGH MENDES | Obituaries |
| Exhibition Dates: Friday February 24th – Saturday March 31st 2012 |
| CHARLIE SMITH LONDON is delighted to present Hugh Mendes with his first one person show at the gallery. Mendes began making oil paintings of newspaper pages in 2001 when he found a scrap of an Arabic newspaper in Brick Lane, east London. Blowing onto his feet, he picked up a newspaper picture of a turbaned man aiming a Kalashnikov which he later made into a painting that formed part of a diptych, the other being a portrait of George W. Bush. Scheduled to be shown at Mendes’ final MA show, opening on September 11th 2001, the artist had portentously paired Bush with a Kalashnikov aimed at him by the then relatively unknown Osama Bin Laden. This became the precursor of one of Mendes’ two obsessions: the first being The War on Terror, a ten year retrospective of which was recently exhibited at Kenny Schachter / ROVE; and the second being an unyielding recreation of newspaper Obituaries. Although it is clear that these paintings belong to the still life genre they are of a very particular niche, and this is the first time that a selection will be shown together as a group. Still life of course brings with it associations of the Memento Mori. Mankind has been warned by artists throughout history to remember that you are mortal, and Hugh Mendes continues this tradition compulsively. The root of this is perhaps biographical. Mendes’ father was a newspaper editor who amassed a collection of hundreds of significant newspaper editions, piles of which were found at his home upon his death. Mendes sat with the deceased body, ruminating for two full days. The artist had also been exposed to the tragedy of bereavement early in life, when he lost his mother prematurely aged 7. As postulated by Freud, trauma is bound by a compulsion to repeat in order to be overcome, and this repetition can be transferred into many forms. In turning to newspapers for obituaries Mendes also creates distance from the personal, sublimating it with the deaths of political, cultural and celebrity figures. And in this a confrontation takes place where loss is mourned and fear defied. There is also a type of redemption, where focus is redrawn from the dead to the living. An obituary is, after all, the celebration of a remarkable life as well as a significant death. In turning to the well-known Mendes’ oeuvre has become a record of our recent life and times, paying homage to those in the public arena, to those deemed successful enough to warrant a page or so in a broadsheet upon their demise. Interestingly celebrity figures have begun collecting Mendes obituaries themselves, flirting perhaps with that which will come to them. Recent noteworthy acquisitions have been made by Jerry Hall and Bill Wyman, for example, which have been private decisions based on the subject portrayed. And it is here where Mendes weaves back into the personal, where the choice of subject is defined by his particular interests. Artists, writers, singers, film stars and political figures such as Lucian Freud, Tom Lubbock, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Amy Winehouse and Muammar Gaddafi are particularly visible, and each selection is made according to their impact on the artist as well as on the world at large. |
Text | Frances Woodley | 2016
| FRANCES WOODLEY |
| Exhibition: The Death of the Artist |
| Exhibition Dates: Friday 14 October - Saturday 12 November 2016 |
| He whose portrait we offer you, Whose art subtler than all others, Teaches us to laugh at ourselves He is a sage, gentle reader. i ‘Verses for the Portrait of Honoré Daumier’. Charles Baudelaire. Hugh Mendes’ ‘unnervingly prophetic’ painting of a press photo of Osama Bin Laden holding a gun to an image of the head of George W. Bush in 2001 heralded a practice that has concentrated on painting as a form of obituary. In a curious way these paintings also pass for still life concerned as they are with iconography, mortality, genre and representation all of which, as the tradition dictates, are explored in a shallow depth of field. Mendes’ paintings are quiet meditations, little games involving hybrids and oppositions: painting/photography, original/reproduction, representation/illusion, portrait/still life, private/public, image/icon, life/death. The exhibition The Death of the Artist includes painted obituaries of artists of special significance to Mendes, including some that he has known for many years. But, as Baudelaire writes, ‘There are some who have never known their Idol’ and Mendes paints these artists too.ii Being filmed painting Obituary: Lucian Freud was an enjoyable experience for the artist though Mendes hadn’t known Freud in life.iii Painting an obituary, according to Mendes, brings them close. Artists whose deaths have occurred in recent years including Anthony Caro, Bruce Lacey and Ellsworth Kelly feature in The Death of the Artist. ‘Every now and then, a well known artist would die and take their turn at my easel’ he says.iv However, these paintings mark more than an artist’s passing, they also mark time, the artist’s time and the art of a time, and in doing so they also become art historical. The obituary is a written notice of a death to be found in a newspaper—a respectful summary of a life in the spirit of a memory. Inherent in its origin, ‘obit’ (from the Latin), is the notion of going forward towards something else. Taken this way, Mendes’ painted obituaries can be understood as more than mere recollection of a life. But a question also emerges: Just whose life is being remembered here? Artist, icon, or image, or are they too close to call? An obituary also condenses a life into a narrative text printed onto newsprint or, as more recently, digitized for screen. The thing that distinguishes Mendes’ painted obituary from the written version, other than the fact of its being painted on canvas, is the absence of narrative. And it seems important here to remind the reader that these painted obituaries are not intended as ‘lives’, the visual equivalent to Vasari’s for example. Instead they are paintings of printed images of the famous that are usually peremptorily trashed, or deleted, after a day in the life of a newspaper. Mendes appropriates these printed images of popular or venerable icons brought fleetingly to the public’s attention by their death, and uses the framework of the obituary to make them become something else in painting. He then swerves away from the protocol of the obituary to cast his practice into conversation with traditional seventeenth century conventions of the vanitas, memento mori, trompe l’oeil and I would suggest, the printed emblematic portrait, before easing it back into the culture of contemporary painting. In doing so, his painting becomes intertextual, reverential and referential. His style of painting embodies some of the characteristics of the photographs he paints. Like a photograph his self-effacement is made possible by the near absence of material gesture, or at least as near as his pace of painting permits. This absence leaves his obituaries open to others—to be ‘read’, to feel attachment. In 1651 the artist David Bailly painted Self Portrait with Vanitas Symbols, a painting of himself as a young man, surrounded by the accumulated objects of a successful career as a painter. The artist placed a much smaller self-portrait in an oval frame upright under his left hand on the table beside him. In this tiny self-portrait he depicted himself as an older man, the age he was at the time of the painting. Intended to outlive the painter, the painting affirms the value of painted resemblance as a form of legacy. Bailly, however, took the added precaution of painting his larger likeness in his prime, in pride of place. When a painting is made of an actual person, like Bailly’s for instance, the painter is concerned to construct an illusion of semblance, substance, weight and form. When a painting is made from a photograph of a person, the painter is left ‘only’ with the problem of making a semblance of a piece of paper on which is printed, not an illusion of the person, but a copy of them as recorded through the lens of a camera. How do we know then that it is the latter that Mendes paints? It is because the slimmest of shadows adheres to a piece of paper in a way that the cast shadow of a head does not. It is this painted attached shadow that inhibits his paintings from becoming icons. The shadow creates an infinitely thin opening for the photographic image to exist between physical canvas and illusory picture plane. ‘Photographic connotation’ writes Barthes ‘like every well structured signification, is an institutional activity; in relation to society overall, its function is to integrate man, to reassure him’.v Mendes’ painted obituaries would seem to unsettle this claim to reassurance. His paintings of photographs are unsettling. The Obituaries bear some resemblance to the trompe l’oeil portraits of Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts (1630-1675) though it is their similarity in appearance rather than intention that is striking. I suggest that Mendes shows little inclination to dissemble in the manner of Gijsbrechts or, for that matter, to startle with photographic lifelikeness as in the portraits by the younger Chuck Close, or the photographic verisimilitude found in Gerhard Richter’s portraits. On the other hand Matt Collishaw’s Last Meal on Death Row series (2011) does make for an interesting comparison, if only in their form of remembrance. Collishaw’s photographs depict the last meals chosen by prisoners on Death Row. Made in the manner of a seventeenth century breakfast piece, they are also ‘portraits’ of those already dead. As such they are memento mori, and not obituary. By representing the subject of the obituary thrice removed, as photograph/newspaper image/still life painting, the artist is still only painting what he sees. It is the way in which he draws his painting into conversations with historical and contemporary painting and photography that expands their depth and accrues for them their meaning and significance. There is another important feature of Mendes’ painting, the picturing of text: titles above the photographs, notes that adhere to a thing prior to being photographed, or adhered to the surface of the photograph prior to painting. Sometimes, as in Obituary: Tom Lubbock, lettering other than the title is left as a trace of a more casual gesture. In SS Margaret, the title of the sitter, Princess, was cropped to playful effect. Picasso pulled the same trick in Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) when he cropped the title of a newspaper (Le Petit Journal) to turn ‘journal’ into ‘jou’ (French for game). Text in Mendes’ work is always carefully considered. In a painting marking the Charlie Hebdo attacks made in collaboration with the artist Harry Pye in 2015, printed newspaper text becomes the primary, and only, object and image for painting. There is little by way of context in these paintings other than what appears in the original photographs, though they are arguably self-contextualising when presented as a series. Sometimes, however, a clue remains. Cy Twombly’s identity bracelet, for instance, is an object that lets something slip in an otherwise inscrutable pose. Occasionally, things coalesce, as happens in Tom Lubbock’s greying temple, a place on the painting where time and pigment run out together. Such events are pure painting. © Frances Woodley September 2016 i Baudelaire, Charles, trans. William Aggeler. ‘Verses for the Portrait of Honoré Daumier’. The Flowers of Evil. Fresno, AA: Academy Library Guild, 1954. ii Baudelaire, Charles, trans. William Aggeler. ‘The Death of Artists’. The Flowers of Evil. Fresno, AA: Academy Library Guild, 1954. iii Ibid. iv Mendes, Hugh. Artist statement, 2016. v Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press. 31. |
Text | Ben Street | 2012
| HUGH MENDES | By Ben Street |
| Exhibition: Obituaries |
| Exhibition Dates: Friday February 24th – Saturday March 31st 2012 |
| In Giovanni Bellini’s 1501 portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, the sitter is compressed behind a stone parapet, his arms invisible to view. Deprived of the agency of limbs, the Doge is pinned in place, reduced to a bureaucratic chess piece. His face, hard lit from the left, is unmistakeably skull-like. His body barely penetrates the shimmering carapace of his damask gown. This is a man filling a recently vacated uniform, carrying out the necessities of his role, before the shadows that creep across his face finally take him. Bellini’s portrait implies the presence of death, and its assiduous realism is a declaration of faith in the afterlife. Portraiture was supposed to capture every crow’s-foot, every furrow, to retain the subject as focal point for posthumous prayer. In the centre of the parapet, Bellini paints a startlingly realistic piece of unfolded paper, called a cartellino, apparently pinned to the wall like a Post-It note, that he uses both as a place of signature and as a kind of assurance that this is really what he saw. The paper in the painting is a kind of confirmation, like a receipt, that an action took place in the world. This man sat here, looking like this. The light fell like this. Hugh Mendes’ paintings belong to the tradition of Bellini’s painting in several important ways. In his Obituary paintings (2009-2012), a piece of paper, like a solitary cartellino, is centred against a stark white background. A tiny rim of shadow passes along two sides, so the paper is evidently within the fictive space of the painting itself. (The implied space of Mendes’ paintings is starkly forensic, with something of the CSI lab about their blank white backgrounds). Each piece of paper has ostensibly been carefully snipped from its newspaper source (in Mendes’ work, the clippings derive exclusively from The Guardian, after a few years of working with The Independent), and features both text – the name of the deceased – and image – their photograph. Take Mendes’ image of Steve Jobs (2011), for instance. The headshot shows Jobs looking, like Loredan, to our left; and although the wrinkling of Jobs’ face reflects the candour of the original photograph, not the desire for celestial redemption, there is a resonance between the two images that implies a continuity of intention between the two painters. Both Bellini’s and Mendes’ paintings perform a kind of pictorial entomology: the subject is pinned into the space of the image, in order to represent something in an implied larger taxonomy of subjects – doges, CEOs, celebrities. Yet Mendes’ paintings are really only portraits at a remove. Strictly speaking, they’re portraits treated as still lifes, paintings of photographic images made distant in the retelling. And the photographs themselves have an implicit distance from their subjects: they’re headshots selected for their likeness, or ability to capture the essence of what makes that person worthy of remembrance. A succession of visual choices creates a crowded back-story in any painting by Mendes. Each one bears an important question about an individual’s relationship with the tangible world: is this really Steve Jobs? Or Richard Hamilton? Or Elizabeth Taylor? In Mendes’ work, still life – a genre that celebrates the tangibility of the physical world, the quiddity of things – becomes vexed, unsure of what it’s able to do. Mendes gives still life an identity crisis. Mendes’ paintings are above all acts of preservation. Each Obituary is pictorial aspic, preventing the yellowing of the printed image through painted reproduction. And since a clipping from a newspaper plays out its own transience as news through physical decay – in other words, is an advertisement for its own impermanence in a way a web page isn’t – Mendes’ paintings represent small moments of transcendence. Mendes’ image of Lucian Freud (2011), for example, depicts a chiaroscuro headshot of the late painter, in perhaps unwitting parallel with Renaissance portraiture. In the artist’s studio, the original clipping fades on the wall, like an inverted Picture of Dorian Gray, while the painting retains the paper’s defiant flatness and crispness. (There is no impending decay in Mendes’ work, as there might be in an image of a basket of fruit: their fields of uninflected white space suggest an extra-temporal situation, a lack of air). As in Wilde’s book, though, the cost of preservation is a form of ghostliness, a sort of inauthenticity. The head on Jeremy Bentham’s embalmed body at University College London had to be replaced with a wax replica; it still looks like him, but it isn’t him (the head is kept in a jar by his feet). Mendes’ paintings enact the strange paradox of posterity: in order for something to stay the same, it must change. Hugh Mendes’ paintings are images not of people, but of people in the act of being remembered. His work’s re-enactment of memory is there in the tension between precision (the careful transcription of the photographic source) and fuzziness (the lines of text, reduced to just-illegible lines of dark grey). What looks painstakingly precise is continually tempered with a painterliness that stands for uncertainty: the slightly fogged text is like that seen in a dream, a hazy mesh of strips that never quite coalesces into writing. Implied in this approach is a yearning held at bay by an absence of complete knowledge, an attempt to communicate in a language you haven’t quite mastered. In Mendes’ 2011 image of art critic and artist Tom Lubbock, the act of translating the photographed face into paint replicates the intense scrutiny of the one left behind, like a loved picture in a locket, as well as reflecting Lubbock’s own penetrating analysis of paintings in his writing. In this sense, Mendes’ Obituaries are suffused with the hidden presence of the artist himself, gazing, as though remembering, at the image on the studio wall, while it imperceptibly deletes itself before his very eyes. Like Bellini’s painting, Mendes’ image of Lubbock is a testament of something having been seen. The act of seeing creates an immortality, of sorts. This paper was here, looking like this. The light fell like this. Ben Street, January 2012 |