Save the drama for your mama. Michael Taylor 2009. Gouache on board; 50cm x 43cm
COOL WAY TO BE COOL
A good old fashion painter in the age of digital art, video boffs and smart-alecky conceptualists, Taylor, like Beck, is an artist at out of synch with the times. Yet, also like Beck, he’s harnessed this alienation to create a body of work that captures the ambiguities and slippages of the contemporary era more profoundly than most young artists. His new solo exhibition is no exception. The selection of works on show in The Plot Thickens are defiantly referential, combining the jazzy visual vocabulary of illustration and graphic design with the gestural freedom of Abstract Expressionism, all inside a figurative format. His sketchy, improvisatory technique often begins with a familiar visual motif. He then employs this image like a pop melody, letting it float loosely atop a ground made of more allusive elements, including moody blocks of colour and impressionistic dabs that have a dark undercurrent despite their playful jocularity. The real magic of his art however lies in the tension he creates between the images and their titles. As much a poet as a painter, Taylor gives his work self-effacing, playful, insecure and intimate titles that often seem strangely out of synch or at odds with the images. As Taylor explains, "I regard this as entry-point into the work of art, from where the viewer proceeds to create meaning.” The result is an utterly postmodern mix of parody, humour, intrigue and innuendo that conveys that it's best to be un-self-conscious, playful and even exuberant about being self-conscious, serious and almost weirdly reticent. Like Beck, he's figured out that it's okay to be sincere and ironic about something worth caring about, because irony doesn't have to be corrosive and because making fun of something a little protects it, makes it (and you) less vulnerable. Which is to say that Taylor embodies a very new, very now, very cool way to be cool.
- Miles KeylockMail & Guardian review of 'The Plot Thickens' exhibition (07/08/09)
http://www.theguide.co.za/arts_detail.php?artsid=4106
View all the work on the show at my website:
http://www.michaeltaylor.co.za
