Andrew Salgado
This is Not the Way to Disneyland
Volta11, Art Basel
June 15 - 20, 2015
Contents
All works created in 2015
4-5 -
This is Not the Way to Disneyland
Foreword by Kurt Beers, Director of Beers London
6-9 -
Welcome to The Party
Essay by Dr. Richard Stemp, Art Historian and Author
12 - 35 -
36 -
Work
Biography
This is Not the Way to Disneyland
Foreword by Kurt Beers, Director of Beers London
Beers London is proud to present This is Not the Way to Disneyland, the newest body
of work by artist Andrew Salgado for Volta11 over Art Basel, June 15-20. The ten paintings, most around 200x200cm in size, mark something of a turn in Salgado’s practice,
where his typically gestural, bold technique has effortlessly adopted a freer sense of
abstraction, freedom, an almost crude approach, met by a saturated, almost hyper
color-scheme.
Each work in the series could - in its own right - evolve into a greater body of work in
itself, however, Salgado is never one to work within confines: growing from what he
felt as an overriding sense of restriction and somberness from his last body of work
(Storytelling, October 2014), here he leaps from one idea to the next, incorporating
wildly contemporary, palimpsest-like mark-making (‘Orpheo’ features a background
painted atop an earlier back-ground); areas of contrast, detail, and saturation creating
an almost non-stop array of visual stimuli; an increasingly gutsy, almost crudely impasto
technique; and even a self-conscious use of materiality and kitsch: glitter, collage, an
‘anything goes’ sense of materiality (yes, those are the artist’s footprints) and even
dollar-store gemstones (in ‘Mauve’, a portrait of Canadian singer Jenn Grant, who wrote
a song of the same name after the death of her mother). The titular piece, ‘Welcome
to Disneyland’, is a 250x250cm play to the tropes found in religious painting, featuring
a young man with a patterned overlay that Salgado dubs the Mickey Swastika: a logo
of sorts created by overlapping contour-line drawings of the ubiquitous classic Mickey
Mouse design. The entire commentary, awash in candy-colors and sunny hues, belies
its subversive intention, begging the viewer to consider that which seems blissfully
happy and all-too-sweet often is not how it appears.
The title for the exhibition was taken from the words ostensibly spoken by the 13 yearold victim of serial killer William Bonin and his four friends, who sexually assaulted and
murdered countless boys in Florida in the ‘80s. One boy was picked up believing he
was being given a ride to Disneyland, and at one point along the journey, apparently
said the horrific – albeit lyrical – words that Salgado appropriated here.
4
Salgado, himself a victim of a hate-crime in 2008, has often used his art to comment on
ideas of misanthropy and the nihilistic tendencies of human nature, and here he returns
to similar ideas previously explored in exhibitions such as 2010’s Paint Your Black Heart
Red (Oslo) and 2012’s The Misanthrope (London). For Salgado, the fascination is one in
which the artist uses art to explore those dark, ubiquitous concepts of human nature, but
his feat here is the play between darkness and light, as though he’s just having fun with it
all. ‘Oh!’, so ambivalently named, so direct and aggressive, and apparently inspired by a
conical children’s paper party hat Salgado found lying about his studio. This should be a
‘fun’ painting, but something about its immediacy and the subject’s lackluster gaze keeps
the viewer at a distance. There is self-awareness even in the most complicit corners: to call
Salgado a simple portraitist would be a gross error.
As a whole, the works comment on mob-mentality, indoctrination, human emotion, and
concealment. Not incidentally, Walt Disney himself has often been criticized as being a
Nazi-propagandist, Anti-Semite, misogynist, and racist, with the corporation even funding
early Nazi propaganda films. For Salgado, any one singular or overly focused reading is
misguided; the artist is most intent for viewers to peel back this candy-colored veneer to
touch upon what is unspoken, unseen, or simply overlooked both in our own personal
histories but also in our shared collective memory as a society.
Salgado, it seems, is having fun with this playful subversion – with titles such as ‘Freakazoid’,
‘Fruit Punch’, and - at long last - Salgado’s first somewhat not-entirely figurative work to
date, ‘For You’, a self-portrait of sorts, depicts a detached hand dipped in black paint. As
Salgado himself has said, his biggest accomplishment with this body of work was opening
more doors for himself than those he has closed. Salgado’s growing mythology seems
endless, bizarre, compelling, and somewhat subversive. That odd little Mickey Swastika
seems a bizarrely appropriate, perfectly off-kilter analogy, an endless circle of ideas, inspirations, and techniques that travel forward but paradoxically return to where they started.
5
Welcome to The Party
Essay by Dr. Richard Stemp, Art Historian and Author
Visiting the studio of Andrew Salgado recently, I asked that most annoying of questions:
which artists do you like? The answer was immediate, direct and unequivocal.
“I like Bacon. Everyone likes Bacon. If you don’t like Bacon, you’re either lying or stupid.”
It seems an unlikely answer given the vivid, brightly coloured surfaces of Salgado’s latest work, rich in paint, it is true, but with every form clearly modelled, the human
features undistorted. Any influence from the undisputed master of post-war angst must
lie beneath the surface.
Growing up in Saskatchewan, Canada there was not much art to be seen – although, as
Salgado himself points out, Agnes Martin, who took American citizenship, was born in
the same prairie province. Aside from a common origin, there is little else to connect
these artists, apart, perhaps, from the square format in which all of his latest works are
painted, a format that Salgado deliberately adopts to challenge himself. “It’s not easy”,
he says, “we are so used to seeing things as either landscape or portrait”. It’s a format
that imposes a certain discipline, much favoured by minimalists, and notably Josef
Albers in his series Homage to the Square - so it’s interesting to note that The Fantasy
of Representation, an exhibition that Salgado is curating for Beers Contemporary
later this year, was inspired by Albers’ statement that, “What counts […] is seeing […]
coupled with fantasy, with imagination.” However, Salgado himself is far from being
a minimalist, as the richly layered, even bejewelled texture of the painterly surfaces
attests. Moving way beyond Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is More”, and even Robert
Venturi’s “Less is a bore!” he states, quite simply, “More is more”. And quite apart from
the purely aesthetic focus on colour and form which minimalism entails, Salgado’s work
is also rich in emotional, sociological and political content.
6
Despite what might be seen as an unlikely background for an artist, growing up near a
locally celebrated watercolourist, with good teachers at school and college, encouraged
him to become a painter. He passes off his early enthusiasm for the work of Chuck Close,
Frida Kahlo, and Roy Lichtenstein, with a dismissive, “Well, they’re easy to like”, but I
can’t help seeing these early seeds taking root in his current work: Close, the master of
the monumental face built up through multiple marks; Kahlo, with her focus on identity,
both personal and shared, original and reconstructed; and Lichtenstein, disarmingly and
disingenuously simple, masking a profound concern with the process of painting, of image
making and image reading. And I can’t help noticing that the older artist’s breakthrough
work of 1961, Look Mickey, shares a similar, ambivalent attitude to the work of Walt Disney,
simply by focusing on Mickey’s shocked response to Donald’s double entendre, “Look
Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one!!”
Like Lichtenstein, Salgado’s work reminds us that what you see is not what you get,
although again, Salgado’s concerns are not purely aesthetic. The title of this exhibition,
This is not the way to Disneyland, comes from one of the child victims of serial killer
William Bonin, who was abducted while waiting for a bus to go to Disneyland. It also
refers to Disney’s right-wing politics. The surfaces may be brilliant, brightly coloured,
with glitter and “dime store gemstones”, decorations and ticker tape, but this is the fun
and hyperactive energy of too many E numbers at a children’s party, it could all end in
tears. The subjects themselves are not enjoying the fun, their faces alternately built up or
stripped back, encased, enclosed and constricted by the framing elements which Salgado
increasingly employs.
7
Nowadays, he is more likely to cite Peter Doig or Bjarne Melgaard as the artists whose
work he most enjoys. While the former is profoundly a painter, the subject of his
works subtle and elliptic, the latter is almost more of a performance artist, his big
bold sculptures and richly coloured paintings apparently intended to provoke and
guaranteed to shock. Salgado’s latest work sits somewhere in the middle, the surface
brilliance and facility of handling masking a contemplative, deeply considered interior.
With increased experience, his technique has become more relaxed, and the paint
more freely applied. The surfaces, like the subjects, have a history, with initial ideas
painted over, leaving only their textures to hint at the origins of this palimpsest.
Collaged elements, such as invitation cards used as improvised palettes, are buried
into the impasto because of the painterly qualities they represent. The materiality of
the work is paramount, and the apparently frivolous nature of some of the materials –
the glittery, gaudy kind – is counteracted by the serious business of art, framing the face
with an arm for example, or with images of twine or thread which alternate between
celebratory and threatening, decorative and restrictive. Plus there are the physical
frames, which complete the work, acting like a full stop at the end of a sentence, or
the final chord in an orchestral composition. But like the echo in a concert hall, their
coloured treatment allows them to resonate beyond the physical limits of the piece.
Seurat experimented by framing his works with a border of complementary-coloured
dots – though collectors soon added frames beyond these. The Futurists, breaking the
established order of the frame continued the energy of their works over it. And Howard
Hodgkin, continuing the painted ‘frames’ within his work has also often painted the
frames themselves. Salgado’s coloured frames share this function, echoing the painted
framing elements within the works – the obstructing mauve band at the top of the
eponymous painting, for example, or the patterned green border of Fruit Punch.
8
While the power of art to both reveal and conceal is essential to the meaning of these
works, if we look beyond the aesthetic concerns it is the human condition, the hidden
angst beneath the sparkling surface, which is ultimately the subject of these paintings.
This is the link with Francis Bacon. An enthusiasm for the artist took Salgado by surprise,
and dates to the Tate retrospective of 2008. Not so surprising, perhaps, when you realise
that this was the year in which Salgado himself was the victim of a hate crime, with the
inevitable, hard-hitting realisation that people are not as good as they should be and all
is not as it seems. This was, of course, one of Bacon’s main concerns, and when asked
about the apparent violence of his art during his last-ever interview he replied quite simply,
“My painting is not violent; it’s life that is violent.” Salgado’s work reflects this idea, and
once below the bright, party-coloured surface of his paintings, the subjects are brooding,
haunted even, although their suffering remains unexplained. Nowhere is this more evident
than in the boldest of the recent works, When I Grow Up, a 21st Century memento mori
in which, in a shocking self-portrait, Salgado shows us the skull beneath his own skin - and
here I am reminded of another of the 20th Century’s great masters, Lucien Freud, who
said, “I want paint to work as flesh… As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I
want it to work for me as flesh does.” Only here, Salgado has removed the flesh.
But even this skull is ambivalent: is this his skull, painted, or a skull painted onto his face,
a carnival mask? Either way, the effect is the same, as art is important: the apparently
severed hand dripping with paint, provocatively entitled For You says as much. Life is
not easy, but we can still enjoy ourselves on what can be a hellish journey. In the musical
Cabaret Sally Bowles describes her dead friend Elsie as ‘the prettiest corpse I’ve ever
seen’. Life is a cabaret, old chum. Welcome to the party.
9
Work
All work created in 2015
Youth in Revolt
Oil on canvas
200x200cm
12
Salerno
Oil on canvas
200x200cm
14
Welcome to Disneyland
Oil and collage on canvas
250x250cm
16
Ping Pong
Oil and pastel on canvas
200x210cm
18
Oh!
Oil and pastel on canvas
200x200cm
20
Orpheo
Oil, pastel, collage, and mixed media on canvas
200x210cm
22
Hamburg’s Stripes
Oil on canvas
200x200cm
24
Mauve
Oil, pastel, and plastic gemstones on canvas
190x190cm
26
For You
Oil and pastel on canvas
190x190cm
28
Freakazoid
Oil on canvas
190x190cm
30
Fruit Punch
Oil on canvas
190x190cm
32
When I Grow Up
Oil, pastel and mixed media on linen
180x180cm
34
Biography
ANDREW SALGADO (b. 1982, Regina, Canada) has situated himself as one of
the eminent emerging painters in both the UK and North America. He has been
listed by Saatchi as “one to invest in today” (Sept 2013), lauded by esteemed
critic Edward Lucie Smith as a “dazzlingly skillful advocate” for painting, and been
openly endorsed by Tony Godfrey (author of Phaidon’s Painting Today). Salgado
has exhibited in the United Kingdom, Germany, Scandinavia, Australia, Venezuela,
Thailand, Korea, South Africa, Canada, and the USA. Forthcoming solo exhibitions
include Youth in Trouble, a solo presentations for Art Basel Miami Week, (December 2015), as well as his much anticipated fourth solo exhibition at Beers (2016).
Salgado is featured in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, authored by Kurt Beers and
published by Thames & Hudson (2014); he is subject of a 2015 documentary,
entitled Storytelling which followed the artist over 4 months while he created a
body of work (www.storytellingfilm.com). He is also curating an exhibition, The
Fantasy of Representation, which includes work by David Hockney, Gary Hume,
Justin Mortimer, and Hurvin Anderson for Beers (July 2015); and he is recipient
of Canada’s SK Lieutenant Governor’s Arts Award (2013). In 2016 the artist will
collaborate with Danish fashion house RAINS to release a line of luxury garments.
Previous solo exhibitions include Storytelling, Beers (2014); Variations on A Theme,
One Art Space, New York City, (2014); Enjoy the Silence, Christopher Møller, Cape
Town, South Africa, (2014); his first museum-based exhibition, The Acquaintance,
Art Gallery of Regina, Canada (2013); and The Misanthrope, Beers, (2012).
His paintings have exhibited in London’s Courtauld Institute of the Arts, included in
the Merida Biennale of Contemporary Art (2010), the NordArt Carlshutte Biennale
(2012); and he has been featured in Artnet.com, Maclean’s (Canada), The Globe
and Mail (Canada), The Independent, The Evening Standard, Shortlist, Yatzer,
Metro, and more. He frequently donates to charitable associations worldwide,
including the Terrence Higgins Trust, MacMillan Cancer Support, and others, and
his work garnered the highest-bid ever auctioned at Canada’s esteemed Friends
For Life Annual Charity Auction (2011). In 2013 he was commissioned to create a
brand new series of large-scale works to adorn the windows of the luxurious UK
retailer, Harvey Nichols.
Salgado lives and works in London, UK.
36
Frames by Sam Chapman
Frame painting by Tim Petch
Printing by Orange Print Ltd
1 Baldwin Street, London, UK, EC1V 9NU
+44(0)2075029078 / [email protected] / www.beerslondon.com
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