|
 |
Ken Weaver
Ken Weaver, Just Call Me the King of the World ‘Cause I Just Got ROYALLY FUCKED!, 2005. Oil pastel on paper, 60 x 40 in. Courtesy of the artist.Back to the future.
It is the year 1988. A year where it all kind of began and ended for me. Gerhard Richter’s brilliant resilient position of “having it all yet declaring nothing” approach to painting was all the rage. This seemed the only ace up the artist’s sleeve. The sole defense the smart painter had at their disposal when combating Post Pop and Post Modern’s total decimation of the handcrafted. Art cruised into The Golden Age of Ironics. Paintings were weaned on the twin teats of critique and theory. It was A Weekend at Bernie’s where the corpse, was literally, painting itself.
Fast forward to the year 2008.
We have witnessed the digital revolution, a new dawn of unparalleled image making. Gone are the archaic demonizations of the epic, its lifeblood, pumped back into corpse of the ambitious. Seemingly, so much has changed since the halcyon days of champagne, cocaine, and Rogaine. Ozzy Osborne is back on center stage, the Terminator keeps on ticking, and the painterly phoenix rises once again from Payne’s Grey ashes.
The Baroque backdrops of my drawings and paintings gleefully hearken back to those outrageous years of excess. Obsessive Rococo dioramas, hyper-detailed, where every inch of canvas is obscenely stroked and caressed, appropriately illustrate our seismic shift into the Age of Porno Graphics. Where everything and anything, at anytime and anywhere, can be inverted or perverted, photoshopped or cropped, fractured, mirrored or cloned. Welcome to the orgy of over saturation, where the fifth element is information, and The Matrix is already considered a rustic and outdated trailer park. My latest series examines this quandary, dilemma vs. opportunity, the agony and the ecstasy of keeping up with the cyber Joneses.
Paris: the near distant future.
What is left of the populace, after a devastatingly apocalyptic World War III, lives beneath the scorched earth’s surface. This is the setting of Chris Marker’s ground breaking 1964 film La Jetee. The plot focuses on the scientists’ experiments to induce time travel in prisoners, time travel both forwards and backwards, seeking salvation by “calling upon the past and the future to come to the aid of the present.” It is Marker’s premise, of a convergence of hindsight with clairvoyance, which I am the most interested in. We live within an insatiable universe. To adequately address these endless possibilities, an exponential use of the past tense and future perfect image is needed. I consider my drawings and paintings tableaux vivants—living pictures. They are theatrical productions where time and space perform on the stage of paper and canvas, operatic collisions of harmony and discord, a perfect storm of the tactile, intellectual, and the interpersonal. This is my requiem, a requiem for the vanitas. Rock me Amadeus!
Back to the future.
It is the year 1988, a year when it all kind of began and ended for me?
