Surrealist Visions

1dontknows, Lola Dupre, David Reed

I write this from bed in my mother’s house, in Ireland. I’ve been home for a week, visiting, sitting, eating, drinking, swimming, laughing, listening, sharing. The joyful task of writing a newsletter about art and culture has fallen to the bottom of an rich and rewarding list. In the relevant vernacular, I’ve been touching grass.

But of course I’ve been frolicking in the digital gardens too, and have founds some interesting nuggets. Here’s some snippets of my online life from the past week or so…

Looking vs. Seeing

In John Yau’s article for Hyperallergic, he touches on some interesting questions about vision, looking, and seeing, in relation to David Reed’s gestural paintings. He says:

As I spent time with the recent paintings, I thought: Can we simultaneously look and see? Or do we need to look again to begin to see? The longer I sat with the art, the more I felt that I wasn’t fully seeing what was there. 

There is an ineffable quality to good art - something that shifts and morphs before our very eyes, and can utterly transform in the time we look away. This is particularly true when we are in physical relation to a work, either in a home or a gallery or museum. These shifts in meaning and matter are in part products of our own internal changes - the memories that swirl around our minds, the emotions that ebb and flow and so on. But these shifts can also be inherent in the work, can play out on the very canvas or screen or pedestal before us.

Lola Dupre

I’ve been admiring Lola Dupre’s work all year. Firstly, her pieces are made entirely with collage, which just blows my mind every time I look at them. Dupre captures texture and colours with such accuracy and subtlety, from the soft fur to the glassy eyes (not to mention the whiskers - what?). There are threads of surrealism and Dada that weave through her work, and her archive is an amalgam of unusual, colourful characters, often animals.

1dontknows

Phanuwat Chukoed is a Thai artist who goes by the moniker 1dontknow. His work blends Renaissance and Surrealist tendencies together in digital collages that feel at once historical and modern. It sometimes feels like there is a thread of narrative that weaves through his practice…an indefinite story that ties everything together, which can only be revealed through careful viewing.

As someone who has studied art history and poured over many’s an old painting, I find it deeply rewarding to see artists who reimagine these old vernaculars…perhaps that’s a topic for a whole other newsletter.

That’s enough now…I must watch the sun rise through the Rowan trees. Adieu.