Bastard Painting
A NEW ATTITUDE BETWEEN AFTERPOP, GOOGLE AND FOLK
A project curated by Gómezdelacuesta to
March 2014
Chapter 1 (Laurina Paperina)
Flesh, blood, sweat and bones, Paperina is an artist who really paints, who speaks about real things even if they seem to be lies, truths made out of lies with images that we know, that we suckled since we were children, for this we like it, for this we want it, for this we believe in it. Paperina builds a new and daring dirty pop, bad and wild, comical and delusional, thrusting its hands into the bowels of the popular, taking out the good, the bad and what she wants, rummaging in her uterus, touching her pussy, calling things by their name, explaining them as they are: sex is sex and garbage is garbage. Paperina eats the same as us -as some of us- and her stools have the appearance of our own, we are what we eat and if we eat the same we will end up looking alike.
Chapter 2 (The Royal Art Lodge)
Now there are no certainties, everything is too close, too mixed, too confusing, we notice that something is happening, that it is changing, we have it in front of us but we do not know how to define it: it is what comes after well known art. Perhaps the collective cease to exist, maybe people no longer gather together this way, maybe yes, maybe the common will return, we perhaps may regain consciousness, because in times of crisis everything and anything is possible, because the world, for better or worse, we already have changed other times.
Chapter 3 (Daniel Johnston)
I don´t know if this group of creators who are catching us by the balls and juggling with them are a generation. Great Ratzinger resigned and god does not exist, but the family that eats together stays together. The only certainty is that these artists -fucked who fuck- do very different things in very different places but look alike, devour the same: independent author of films and series B, Tarantino, Tim Burton and David Lynch, Star Wars and King Kong, underground comics and fanzines, the cartoon and the anticartoon, manga and anime, and Dr. Slump but also Dr. Doom, Hayao Miyazaki and Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball and Musculman, the Beat -they were a generation- and the Nocillas -that perhaps are- Daniel Johnston drawing but also singing, and Tom Waits, and Edith Piaf… We grew up watching Japanese cartoons and now see Family Guy, the Simpsons, Futurama and South Park, yet still play with Sonic, Mario Bros and Space Invaders, Gary Panter and Wayne White make us fathers and we worship Rocco Siffredi, Yoshitomo Nara and Jean Michel Basquiat. We all had a TV at home, and two, then three, we bought the first computers with its pixel aesthetics and its four colors, an Amstrad, a Spectrum, game consoles, Game Boys and Play Stations, then came the Internet, globalization and a kind of true self absorption.
Chapter 4 (David Shrigley)
And here we are dealing with an art that arises torn, bitched and aggressive, sometimes violent, irreverent, tragicomic, always with a sense of humor, with laughter as end and means, blessed art comedy, and unapologetic art. A powerful imagery and symbolism of postmodern icons from afar: the phallus and the skull, shoddy antiheroes and authentic crap, an art made by some guys who love drawing and painting, they hate the academy, an outsider art of American, European, Japanese and Chinese, an art fruit of the anger, oppression, frustration, rage and global warming, of quality and desire, but also of a certain hedonism and some spontaneous masturbation, an art without conceptualism nor minimalism, straight to the point and absurd, anarchic and subversive art of this generation with a ship, without a flag and post-lethargy, pirate artists that will change the world or die trying, they want to say something or just send us to hell, lets prepare our minds in case.
Chapter 5 (Albert Pinya)
Painting, always painting, lots of paint, good and bad, and other techniques, all we that we can, but always the painting. Returning to where we never left, returning to basics, to that painting (un) contained in a wild drawing of direct forms and pure colours, rich, vivid and intense, almost always flat, without degradation, or shading without chiaroscuro. An obvious painting, without abstractions or mannerisms, nor just white or just black, with almost no perspective, more Romanesque than Baroque, a blatant drawing that goes straight to the brain. Performances, the interactive, the installation, the digital, video, photo, light and sound, whatever you want, whatever they want, but also painting, always painting, coming home, returning to load. Painting mutates and adapts, and much may be said, the painting never dies nor goes: I paint therefore I am.
Chapter 6 (Matt Leines)
Direct topics, raw contents, images that are treated with a childlike appearance, innocent, naive look, deliberately using provocation, irony and the sense of humour to delve into consciousness, to fix retinas and generate a certain controversy. Art as a reaction, as action, as a game ,but also as a claim, such passion, such irreverence, as a compromise, as criticism and self-criticism, as narrative and as tragicomedy. Art as a metaphor for total universality and absolute ignorance, an art that gives no heed to religions, homelands, flags, languages, genders or walls.
Chapter 7 (Cristina de Miguel)
Crises always stimulate creators and she would not be an exception, demands them, squeeze them, fucks them, but also makes them sharpen the mind. The result is often good art by good artists going through bad times or good bad art of good artists through bad times, moments. The crisis is the turning point, of change, the time span in which things happen, a society trying to recover core values, which it demands and struggles for.
Chapter 8 (Misaki Kawai)
The Italian Transvanguardia and the Young British Artists, those Freeze organized by Damien Hirst, generations that preceeded us and that shed light into the difficulties of building new generations. Now we talk of artists born in the context of the 60s, 70s and 80s, who have lived an increasingly globalized world, homogenized in a tolerated difference. But these makers we speak of are people with a well-defined identity in an anesthetized context, in a society at a standstill, asleep, and types that dedramatised and revitalise themselves, an impossible generation that is being built every day.
Chapter 9 (Lamelos)
The new approaches to creating art constantly resort to pre-existing concepts and images , some background images that become new concepts , the archive not only as a form of witness but as a means of creating, an investigated and intervened archive, the history of art of the past, present and future. New images that arise from the unfathomable production and accumulation that precedes us, a repertory that we continue filling with transcendental things and others completly irrelevent.
Chapter 10 (Federico Solmi)
Simple materials, in a slightly ostentatious format, without lust, iconography and recurring symbols, graffiti, street art and postgraffiti. Demystifying things and starting by themselves, we are somebody, they say, and often they are. The tag as self-portrait, the constant use of autobiographical elements, as a base image, but also the use of the word, text and verbal communication. Installations, animations and performances, a cartoon aesthetics of the toy that haunts the visual narratives, because her art is not so much a matter of technique, or of form, as a communication involving a story, albeit minimal, as a sms of an online generation that lives deep in speed and immediacy.
Chapter 11 (Megan Whitmarsh)
Pop after pop, afterpop, postmodernism, humanism and hybridity, dadaist pop and nihilism, Nocilla Generations and creators of shit, Lowbrow Californian and European surrealist pop. We talk about the ethics and aesthetics, of negation, of everything and nothing, the concepts are describing our contemporanity, they are explaining to a whole generation that we still barely know how to define. Contents that can be found in music and in their reviews, in movies, fiction and irreverent cartoons.
Chapter 12 (Matthew Thurber)
Guys who combine theory with practice, the detailed analysis with an assault to the hierarchies, without high or low cultures, leaving the expression of the vibrant panorama that occurs in the age of the media, with the media and against the media.
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