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‘1968’, with Jonathan Callan and Carolyn Thompson. Eagle Gallery, London. 07.02.19 - 8.03.19
Spurred on by the anniversary of the ‘Events of May’ in 1968, I researched the graffiti written on walls in Paris during that dramatic period, and used them as the basis for a series of paintings. I was struck by the utopianism of the texts, which, especially in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2017 and the general lurch to the right in France, seemed especially poignant. The dark and brooding colours are intended to suggest something tragic and in danger of being lost. The gold vertical bars can be read as hopeful, but also as a form of erasure. In using gold I had in mind the tradition of icon painting. So, one way of describing these paintings is to call them ‘humanist icons.’
The graffiti texts used in the paintings in the exhibition are:
I also selected four books that were read by the students of the period, and painted them as 'Book-Paintings'. The books are:
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