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Whitney McVeigh and Pascal Demeester at the Gallery Soho, London
Suzie Walshe
An exhibition of Whitney McVeigh and Pascal Demeester’s work will be on display at the The Gallery Soho, London through March 27, 2008.
Whitney McVeigh. From the Heads Series. Courtesy of the artist.Last night The Gallery Soho in London witnessed an exceptional display of two contemporary artists dealing with classic themes in innovative ways. American born painter Whitney McVeigh and the Belgian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Pascal Demeester introduced the audience to their latest works.McVeigh presented new paintings from her Heads series, which are executed in acrylic on paper and canvas, which contrast yet compliment beautifully with Demeester’s selection of conceptual photographs. Recently awarded the Sovereign European Art Prize by Saatchi coordinator Rebecca Wilson, she was also recently featured in the Financial Times. Here, Deemester employs his experience of working in the fashion and design world, producing a series of often startling surrealist images. He uses his conscious as a receptor/selector to capture visions from his subconscious, thus creating some startling and beautiful images. His automatic style encourages the viewer to make multiple interpretations and associations for themselves.
Similarly, McVeigh explores what she has often called, "the internal landscape: our make-up", seeing her Heads as an "intricate study of human truth." Like the sculpted heads of Elisabeth Frink, McVeigh’s Heads paintings allude to the tension between universal human frailty and the totemic qualities of the human image that are central to ancient and “primitive” art. An experienced and mature artist McVeigh’s signature focus centers on the human form, particularly women’s bodies; her own image; sexuality; myth and spirituality; non-Western symbols; and dreamlike visions. Elegant and elusive, her paintings embrace ambiguity in life, death, and art, often translating the chaste into the erotic with painterly abandon.However, last night’s exhibition highlighted McVeigh’s extraordinary ability as an iconographer. Drawing from a cacophony of timeless symbols, themes, cultures, periods, media, ways of thought, and of life, she captures a rare truth within each of her images. It is this truth and brutality that make images that startle the viewer. Unlike the Surrealists, who directed their attention to creating a new visual vocabulary in order to elucidate traditional meanings, McVeigh’s images are pure inventions replete with new understandings.
Her intensely subjective, skewed self-portraits and gesturing, ambivalent figures, often depicted in rich colors, suggest both Surrealist and Expressionist references. Whereas the concept underlying most Surrealist art presupposed certain knowledge of their pictorial sources, McVeigh exploits figurative images for non-narrative purposes. In this respect, she also departs from her more immediate contemporaries—Demeester included. McVeigh’s paintings do not tell a story, nor do they provide a description of a situation—the work does far more than this; each image attempts to unsettle the observer’s conventional assumption of reality.
