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| David Spiller |
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David Spiller's new series of paintings is in one sense a surprise. Few people who know his work would have categorised him as being instinctively a landscape painter. Yet at the same time they are paintings that remain faithful to the main line of his development as an artist. The elements that have gone to make the images are extremely various - some might say heterogeneous. One can identify, for instance, elements that seem to owe a good deal to cartoon films. An example is I Could Hold You for a Million Years: Nightfall. In this the adroitly simplified house has the gemutlich feeling we associate with some of Disney's more sentimental efforts. Other paintings have links not simply to cartoon backgrounds but to actual cartoon animation. Here one can point to Crazy Days That Made You Smile: Avalanche, and to Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Orange Tornado, both of which look like still images snatched from a particularly turbulent sequence portraying some typical animated cartoon catastrophe - which is to say, a catastrophe that in the end will not do harm to anybody. If we reach back, beyond the world of animated cartoons, into more exotic territory, there is one kind of art that comes insistently to mind, and that is the Japanese woodblock print. The great masters of woodblock landscape, Hiroshige and Hokusai, surely find equivalents here. One only has to look at a print such as Hiroshige's Moonpine, Ueno, from the Hundred Views of Edo, to note a close similarity of method between this and Spiller's Don't Look Back in Anger: Tree in the Snow. In both compositions there is a radical simplification of form, combined with the use of flat, unmodulated areas of strong colour. In both, too, there is a sure sense of how the composition ought to be cropped. Japanese ukioy-e prints had a considerable impact on European art in the closing years of the19th century, when they began to reach Europe in quantity, often as packing for items that were considered to be more precious, Among the artists who admired them profoundly were Van Gogh and Gauguin. Spiller's new series represents a revival of this enthusiasm. However, his approach necessarily differs from those of the first European admirers of this school of print-making. For one thing, Spiller belongs to a generation that has not only passed through Modernism but also through the very specific experience offered by Pop Art. It is worth pausing for a moment to think about this. I have, for example, said something about the relationship between this series of paintings and the backgrounds seen in the animations created by the Disney studios and their rivals. In fact, it is fairly clear that Japanese prints, in addition to inspiring major western painters, also had a major impact on western popular art forms. This was fair enough, as ukioy-e prints were never an elite art. They were intended to appeal, not to samurai, but to the bustling urban population of what was then Edo and is now Tokyo. Cartoon films, of course, are another instance of art of this sort. At the moment, they have two main branches, western and eastern. Cartoons made in Japan, anime as they are called, in a bastardisation of the English word 'animated', have obvious links to the tradition of the great woodblock printmakers who flourished in Japan during the 18th and 19th centuries. Made using a technology born in the west, they are now a quintessentially accurate reflection of contemporary Japanese culture, and are also an increasingly important source of artistic inspiration for western artists, because of their exuberant, childlike visual inventiveness. Spiller does not belong to the group of artists, mostly French, who have made a cult of anime in recent years. He does, however, have certain broad aims in common with them. If we look at his landscapes closely, we see apparently contradictory qualities. On the one hand, these are genuinely innocent pictures - in the complimentary sense of that adjective. Their aim is to give pleasure, to make us feel better about ourselves and about the world. On the other hand, the visual techniques they employ are highly sophisticated. The most obviously radical features of these paintings are the floating disks of colour that interrupt our view of what is behind. They are an abstract element arbitrarily introduced into art that is without apology figurative. The mixture of figurative and abstract elements is not new to western art, one encounters it, for instance, in the group of transitional paintings that Kandinsky produced before his work became fully abstract. Some of us would even claim that there is a hidden figurative element in Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. It also, and more certainly, exists in the abstracted landscapes, such as 'Door to the River' that are de Kooning's greatest works, and in some paintings by Milton Avery. Abstraction and figuration are, however, usually intermingled, to the point where it is impossible to separate abstract and figurative elements. That is not the case here. The disks serve to establish the picture-plane, and at the same time force us to look behind them to consider the figurative element. Because we have to circumvent these insistent circles of colour, the drastically simplified landscape motifs acquire a dynamism that they might not in other circumstances possess. I wondered for a moment what this device reminded me of, then recalled that there is in fact a precedent in some of the Japanese lacquer wares designed by an artist who lived somewhat earlier than Hokusai and Hiroshiqe - Ogata Korin [1658-1716]. Using mother-of-pearl and metal inlays, Korin created designs that momentarily disorientate the spectator's vision. This disorientation gives an extraordinary physicality to the experience of looking at what he produced. The compositions tease the eye in a way that not even the great printmakers were able to achieve. This analysis may perhaps give the impression that I value Spiller's new landscapes chiefly for their decorative qualities. This is not the case. The decorative exuberance they undoubtedly possess contributes to a broader life-affirming statement about the painter's appetite for sensual experience - something that has, alas, become increasing rare in the art of our time. © Edward Lucie-Smith
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Selected Bibliography 1942 Born in
Dartford Kent 1987 Zeitkunst
Gallery, Innsbruck and Cologne (solo show) 1989 Twinings Gallery, New York (solo show) 1990 Alexander
Roussos Gallery, London 1991 Ariadne
Gallery, Vienna (solo show) 1992 Reflex Gallery,
Vienna (solo show) 1993 Gallery
Naviglio, Milan and Venice, Italy 1994 Gallery
Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark (solo show) 1995 Gallery
Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark 1997 Gallery
Cotthem, Barcelona, Spain (solo show) 2000 Gallery Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark (solo show); Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, Florida; Beaux Arts, London 2002 Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, Florida, USA; (Contemporary Narrative) Museum Espace Belleville, Paris (Courtesy Guy Pieters); (L'humour Dans L'art Contemporian) Galerie Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark; Summer Show, Beaux Arts, London Beaux Arts, London (solo show) (Catalogue essay by Martin Gayford) 2003 Royal West of England Academy Art Fairs Selected Recent Reviews Jonathan Jones, Modern Painters, Autumn 1998 Charles Dee Mitchell, Art in America, May 1998 James Lawrence, Contemporary Visual Arts, October, 1999 |
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