"Mirror Man", The Human League - the song alludes to pop culture, self-consumption and reflections broken- meaning altered. Later, the band said the song was about Adam Ant and his self-absorption. I usurp the song and reuse it as the tune for the brilliant, scintillating and reflective Phil King ( culture absorbing but not self-absorbing) artist and his musing, refracted - meaning altered - paintings that re-frame art, history and self-reflection - here comes the Mirror Man
Here Comes The Mirror Man
Phil King is a consummate absorber of art culture; he wields his knowledge and returns it back in a myriad of painterly moments, both humble and magnificently mirrored.
His references to the inventive nature of Cézanne, Picasso, Klee, and Guston can been seen in King’s brushed marks. Like chiral structures they appear similar, but the meaning contained within is different – new – and it opens a fresh, inventive, way to discover painting through King; the mirror man.
The notion of a ‘reflection’ is enmeshed in the history of art and I would argue that art history is the collected and evolving reflections of what it is to be human.
The first time our ancestors traced a finger in the sand and saw themselves in their creation, their sandy mark became a reflection manifesting their deepening consciousness. Reflecting on the work of Phil King is akin to looking into a scrying mirror of Modernism; his paintings are a reversed modernist gestalt . . . edged in black.
King’s employment of black paint is confident, delineated-yet-dissolving, and applied in a loose-structured painterly manner. There is an accentuation of prominent features. There is playfulness. There is a hint that these marks are reflected from a black mirror. Stare into the surface and shadowy references to myths, legends and history emerge.
Towards the end of the 18th Century ‘black mirrors’ became fashionable amongst those that sought to paint the ‘Picturesque’ (as championed by William Gilpin). This gadget was called a ‘Claude Mirror” (named after the Baroque master Claude Lorraine) – a convex darkly tinted mirror – which resulted in a somewhat muted reflection, which stressed the prominent features in the landscape at the expense of detail.
King’s black mirror draws out the conspicuous features from a wealth of art history painting which he then deeply reflects upon and returns to us in innovative and interesting ways.
In King’s paintings there is rhythm, wonderfully syncopated. Paint dances on shifting surfaces and they are filled with echoes of painterly allusions, orchestrated and circus-like. Cascading compositions of modernist signs – curt marks, slow-fat marks, and parabolas, all swoosh and arc in ever-declining bounces – all are caught in a patchwork of linear gestures, stitched and layered together; inventive stuff. The gestures stand as ‘art-history-speak’ and this language has punctuation. Punctuation, writ large in ‘full-stops’ – holes cut out of the canvas – where the zero(ness) of this tactic takes a twist: The empty hole re-enforces the physicality of the painting, and in doing so reminds us that the paintings are also objects. The cut holes in King’s canvases also remind one of the works of Fontana and the later Arte Povera movement.
These nods, ticks and habits conspire to an inventiveness played out on a variety of surfaces. Here is an artist who has embraced the spirit of Arte Povera and eschews carefully crafted canvases and lavish materials in favour of a cheap Hobby-Craft bargain-bucket canvas and jagged cardboard pieces. King metaphorically bazookas his paintings at the gallery wall. King teaches us that by rejecting the expensive presentation one can replace it with something better. Inventive presentation!
Paint, history, and surface collide – there is something postmodern in King’s telling and re-telling – something reflective – something scintillating. All to which end open the painting to multi-facetted beginnings. King holds a mirror to his reflected world and it is caught in an infinite reversed loop.
Paint matters to King. The fact that King’s ideas are conceived and held in chemical actuality – paint pigment – means we are reminded that we inhabit a world made of molecules formed from atoms.
Chiral, a term common to organic chemistry reflect the building blocks or molecules that go into making up our living world. These blocks favour just one handedness. For example, Limonene is a molecule contained in both oranges and lemons. It is the molecule that gives the fruit their distinctive smell. This chiral molecule smells like an orange but its mirror version smells like a lemon. In other words, the mirror image of a molecular structure may look similar – albeit reversed – but it can be completely different!
Flash, bang and considered – and considerable – wallop! Here comes the mirror man.
This book will do two things; it will provide useful cooking instruction and it will act as a document of the artist’s life.
The abiding feeling I get from Hofman’s artwork is the special value she places on the mundane. She is an artist who sees magic hidden in the ordinary – and by measuring and marking that magic makes the ordinary . . . extraordinary.
The cookbook idea is an extension of a practical philosophy and there's poignancy in its notion of a document (of a life) measured out through cooking recipes; this reflects a universality – we all have to eat - while celebrating moments in life; family get-togethers, weddings, births and deaths. Essentially Hofman is fascinated by what it is to be human.
Through her cookbook idea one can segue into Hofman’s world.
What is her world like? Think 1950s domestic goddess serving cocktails at six. Think tea length swing dresses with added petticoat for volume. Hers is a world filled with bunting and celebration, but it is also a place where one is reminded to stop and take a moment to cherish and reflect upon the magic moments that make up a life.
The artist’s work is not only contained in her printmaking and painting; it is spread, drizzled and mixed into her own life – art for Hofman is as necessary as eating food – it's a mutually inclusive relationship.
Hofman’s background is in teaching and this has, to a certain degree, informed her critical perspective which is manifest as a symbiotic approach to art-making. Her art practice embraces collaboration, be it by sharing a recipe, opening her studio to the public, or volunteering her creative expertise to community art groups.
Collaborations spark learning and connections, and, for Hofman they began with shared moments with family over the dining table, moments that later evolved to include the wider public and community groups in different events. By reaching out to the wider community Hofman is reminding us that we are social creatures and sometime the best, most magical, moments in life are when we feel connected.
You are what you eat. This maxim can be extended to include; you are what you wear, and; you are what you think, what you say, what you write; all your actions become you – a perfect shape of you – a form accrued from being alive and barrelling through this life. Hofman is aware of this and her inspiration is drawn from her own autobiography; she writes to document her history and her place – her art works towards the humble and yet powerful idea: I am here and I did this.
Pared down Pre-Raphaelite colour spills from her fingertips forming bright motifs, some of which rest on surfaces of paint, some are hand-stitched, and some are defined by inky print-work – all of them look good enough to eat!
Hofman’s work is infused by the tradition of British art and design; sprinkled with a smattering of Arts & Crafts allusions and suffused with storybooks from her childhood. Bubbling just under the surface there's a hint towards British Pop Art and the work of Peter Blake and Jan Haworth – who famously co-designed the Beatles Sgt Pepper’s album cover.
In the book she is working on all these references are carefully combined with an English culinary aesthetic gleaned from an array of cookery books from the 1940s to the 70s, and dished out in a kind of shorthand that harks to that quintessential post-war Britishness. A retrospective take is integral to Hofman, but her work is not caught in aspic.
Hofman looks to the past to make artwork for the future.
To understand ourselves, we need to be aware of the past with an eye to the future. Hofman’s work reminds us that history matters especially now in the current nostalgia ridden political climate. We can celebrate the past, but we cannot return to the past! Hofman deftly separates those aspects of British culture that feed into her autobiographical history and then magically recomposes them, as if they were ingredients in a recipe. She balances all the moments that make up a life, moments of sorrow are balanced by moments of joy – she reminds us that they both matter - her palette perfectly reflects all of a life lived and a life being lived! By Alastair Eales
Kim Wan: Paint Skin
To appropriate the words of Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message”. In the case of Kim Wan, rudimentary equates immediacy; this is an artist who paints first and asks questions later!
Kim Wan’s work is wonderfully rudimentary. It is rudimentary, in the sense that it is about the fundamental blocks that constitute a medium – oil paint – and it is about combining that with an idea of what is 'inside himself'. Basic stuff. Paint and the surface which it is applied to, which in turn form the warp and weft of the ''World according to Wan'. Wan's World becomes the world within his skins, and his skins can cover everything.
Wan enjoys paint! Great volumic clods of smeary paint – gathered together and layered – twirled, slathered hastily, and yet always controlled and unadulterated. Paint is skin – it sits on the surface and (usually) alludes to form – but in Wan’s case his painterly skin holds a beating heart; it is his personal message to the world.
Kim Wan’s skill lies in the combination of the physical skin of paint, and its application, to form interesting and unexpected relationships. His paint describes form, and its sheer volume becomes form; it becomes an object of “an object”. Slathering, stratified clods that form landscapes of paint, that make skin surfaces. Wan’s topography of paint skin and its inferred meaning encapsulate everything in the pliable congregation of an ever-shifting, evolving and borderless environment. It contains something limitless; it's the skin of something infinite. The ground onto which his environments adhere could just as easily be a canvas as a concrete floor or an old sideboard. He's a painter who goes over the edge between art object and everything else. He is an artist with skin in the game.
This makes his environments vulnerable and violent, on edge and paradoxical; everything becomes an autobiographical façade; awkward and brilliant, difficult. Wan’s work rests on this difficult knife-edge between contained self-love and actual, recognisable, unbound genius.
There is a danger, of course, that, in his exuberance, his work could fall on the side of self-indulgence; that he is implicitly saying that his art, that he himself, really is everything. However, this indulgence allows a chance of a catalyst – there appears to be a symbiotic relationship between the 'indulgence' and 'genius'; both are needed, both are valid and combined, both aspects yield results!
The art critic and writer, Sasha Craddock remarked of Wan’s painting back in 1998, and I paraphrase:
“Kim paints with such energy that one may think the result could only be a mess, but in this case [points to very large painting of thick, loose gestural marks in ultramarine and pink].There is a fine line between utter indulgence and brilliance – Kim paints like a maestro – at least in this painting, maybe his other work is awkward indulgences?”
Squirting £250 of oil paint onto a canvas, all in one go, is an indulgence: a self-gratifying outlay of artistic spending power.
So I am going to suggest that awkward solipsism and brilliant outlay exist at the same time. I'm going to propose that Wan’s best work is his most awkward and indulgent work; that it is a brilliant form of compromised genius.
It is Kim Wan’s exclusive focus on the painterly that drives the violence, the verve and vigour of his paintings and at the same time echoes his vulnerability and vacillation within a certain tunnel vision. He is an artist caught between flesh and sinew, between pigment and medium; an artist who revolves around a helix of what it is to be everything inside a human skin but who then compromises that with his chosen medium; he ends up articulating being human in paint and so everything becomes boundlessly alive within his paintings' thick skin.
By revolving around an indulgence of self - coupled with an articulation of that self-satisfaction within the outlay of an expensive new artificial skin, and by trying to go beyond the limits imposed by this colourful artistic paint surface, he has also found a way of going beyond his own skin.
And all of this, by simply slapping paint about!
By Alastair Eales (Editorial essay support: Phil King)