Attending the show of collected paintings and sculptural works, under the loosely fixing title, Body Language, at London’s Saatchi Gallery, proved positively rewarding.
Much of that is due to the lush paintings that hang on the walls like decorative colossus’s; with deliciously coloured canvases, whose paints appear deliberately and very diligently applied. Which are accompanied by a smaller number of idiosyncratic sculptural works, applied to plinths and accompanying floor space. Moreover in exchange for any curatorial significance of what is on often, there is a satisfying air about the gallery spaces, as works are located more intuitively, almost as an impulsive show of force.
Impressively that qualified sensation of something new comes almost immediately with the cavalier works of Los Angeles painter Henry Taylor, who introduced the exhibition with the work, Untitled, (Finger), 2008. A substantial canvas of an abstracted confrontation of two loosely painted faces sizing up to another, with a pendulum shaped arm and hand pointing away from a white protagonist, into the face of the black caricature. Another is a beautifully rendered acrylic canvas, What Can I Say? 2011, which has a naked female figure laid out on a dilapidated sofa; with one leg outstretched over the backrest. Clearly Taylor laboured less over detail, instead recalling something of the highly stylised poster imagery of French illustrator Toulouse-Lautrec. In the adjoining room the works of Brooklyn based artist Eddie Martinez appear pinned to the walls like expressionist billboards.
Martinez appears to borrow a great deal from American art history, as there is a real sense of the definitive influence of Willem de Kooning, and his contemporary Philip Guston upon the artists exaggerated style. The Feast 2010 appears as a post-modern take of de Vinci’s last supper, in which in Martinez’s work twelve figures sit one beside the other, resembling the familiar compositional arrangement of the biblical work. In The Feast the crudely cut figures face out into the middle distance, whilst their elongated dining table is littered with a cornucopia of coloured nourishments.
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