Ged Quinn
Ged Quinn’s paintings introduce new and universal topics, evolving from a spectrum of sources in art history, photographs, memory, newspaper cuttings and books.
Places in the World to Hide (2008), a painting from one of Thomas Cole’s vast allegorical cycles The Course of Empire (1836), becomes the setting for a dilapidated shanty town. At its entrance stands a decorative gate to a heaven more funeral parlour than Romantic Elysium. Blood-stained clothes and a Sudarium hang on a line above further ramshackle evidence of the dwelling’s unknown, unseen inhabitants. From the left approaches a traveller carrying a magic lantern and wearing a makeshift gas mask to protect against the arena of disaster on whose threshold he stands. Swastika-branded sheep at his feet further mythologise this strange explorer, a wandering soul discovering, returning, or perhaps already departed.
In another work, based upon a Jacob van Ruisdael seascape, a raft is caught in turbulent seas in implicit allusion to Delacroix’s Raft of the Medusa. With the helmsman adrift the vessel’s covering has blown back to reveal a reliquary containing the body of a saint, part human part bird. As it runs aground the raft’s cargo breaks loose and is lost to the water. Above this debacle, in a tempestuous sky, looms a version of Dante’s circles of hell at a scale making it resemble also some kind of industrial lowering planet or Death Star. The interplay between representation, history, legend, fact and make-believe is heightened through the addition of trompe l’oeil slashes to the surface of the painting. Making explicit the act, the illusion and the politics of image making, the markings (a reference to the attack on Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus) call into question the relevance of history painting to the contemporary, and the larger, more universal formation and consumption of cultural discourse.
In another work, based upon a Jacob van Ruisdael seascape, a raft is caught in turbulent seas in implicit allusion to Delacroix’s Raft of the Medusa. With the helmsman adrift the vessel’s covering has blown back to reveal a reliquary containing the body of a saint, part human part bird. As it runs aground the raft’s cargo breaks loose and is lost to the water. Above this debacle, in a tempestuous sky, looms a version of Dante’s circles of hell at a scale making it resemble also some kind of industrial lowering planet or Death Star. The interplay between representation, history, legend, fact and make-believe is heightened through the addition of trompe l’oeil slashes to the surface of the painting. Making explicit the act, the illusion and the politics of image making, the markings (a reference to the attack on Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus) call into question the relevance of history painting to the contemporary, and the larger, more universal formation and consumption of cultural discourse.
