Star Telegram
Ged Quinn at the Modern invites careful reading
27 April 2012
Gaile Robinson
Ged Quinn exhibit at the Modern invites careful
reading
Posted Friday, Apr. 27, 2012
Focus: Ged Quinn
Through June 17
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St.
BY GAILE ROBINSON
[email protected]
Large, beautiful landscape paintings with the kind of vistas that stretch to the
state line are hanging in the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
Your eyes follow rivers that wind past woods and meadows and through the
cut in the mountains as the setting sun washes the peaks pink, and the clouds
light up in nursery pastels. Every leaf on the trees is painted, as is every
pebble and twig.
It's the vision of a man-tamed nature that is more European than Hudson
River School (more Claude Lorrain than Thomas Cole).
In each landscape, though, is the intrusion of a utopian construction that is
falling to ruin, often accompanied by a dead body or the skeletal specter of
death. The meshing of these old tropes has a contemporary spin, and they
are as new as this calendar year. They are by Ged Quinn, the British artist
who is having his first North American exhibit.
Quinn's ability to re-create the style of the master landscapists is dazzling, but
it is the present/past narrative that he wants the viewer to appreciate and
linger over. There is no linear story, only life experience and knowledge of the
literary classics to guide the viewer through interpretation. "Every reading is
valid," Quinn says reassuringly.
Don't be surprised if the paintings send you running to Wikipedia and
Artcyclopedia, searching for background.
How much do you know about Henry Wallis' Death of Chatterton from 1856?
Not much? Me neither. (Thomas Chatterton was an 18th-century poet who
Star Telegram
Ged Quinn at the Modern invites careful reading
27 April 2012
Gaile Robinson
committed suicide at age 17.) It helps to know that when viewing Quinn's
Melancholia Simplex.
There is a reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in What the Lark Said (Death
and the Maiden) with the visual remains of the ruined pleasure dome and a
woman with a flayed back sitting next to a video-camera-holding skeleton.
The scene conjures the passage "But oh! that deep romantic chasm which
slanted/Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!/A savage place! as holy
and enchanted/As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted/By woman
wailing for her demon-lover!"
Quinn inserts the multistepped levels of hell from Dante Alighieri's 14thcentury epic poem Divine Comedy in Ouranophobia, where two side chairs
have been pulled up along the rim of the descending abyss as if it were the
television screen. Tonight: The Housewives of the Second Circle.
"I made the things I wanted to see and where I wanted to be while
incorporating the conceptual possibilities of using historical paintings," says
Quinn. "It's about the slippage of ideas between the historical and the utopian
drive forward."
A series of small still-lifes stretch along one wall. They are as anachronistic as
the huge landscapes because in each cozy scene with fruit, platters, tankards
and knives is a cake, a sweet dessert carved to resemble WWII bunkers built
by the Nazis that still dot the French coastline.
Quinn became enamored of their shapes as signifiers of destruction and
oppression, and included the constructions to signal the regime's failed
vanities.
A similar thread of historic atrocities cloaked in signifiers runs through much of
the output of Anselm Kiefer, and Quinn admits that he is a huge fan of the
German artist's paintings.
So Quinn's paintings, which are deeply layered with meaning and not always
easily understood, are in good company in the Modern. The paintings, though,
can be appreciated solely for their great craftsmanship or dwelled upon for a
more complex narrative.
Gaile Robinson is the Star-Telegram art and design critic, 817-390-7113