Art Review - March Issue - (Page 81)
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RAPPOLT Michael Simpson as part of the 1959 Young Contemporaries
exhibition in London. Since then but way back in 1974 , Young
Contemporaries fr has become New Contemporaries,, and Simpson a little
less fresh to the scene. Now that he’s p sixty-six, Simpson’s future,,
many might say,, would appear to be in the past. But greatness is a s
quality that often takes time to develop. It’s certainly not a synonym
for youth. Since Since 1989 Simpson has been working on a series of very
large paintings that ostensibly take benches as their sole subject
matter.. ‘Ugh – old AND boring’, you’re probably thinking to ou
yourselves round about now; you shouldn’t be so easily put o .
Simpson’s benches are truly ee-dimensional d sculptures remarkable
things. Oddly three-dimensional it’s hard not to think of the benches as
sculptur om memory, they rather than paintings and painted from memor they
seem, both aesthetically and ideologically ideologically, to be some sort
of bizarre mix-up in which fifteenth-century Venetian painting has been
suspended in a modern-art solvent with references to minimalism, Brutalism
and Pop art . But beyond that, the paintings take the life of the renegade
philosopher Giordano Bruno often described as one of the founders of free
thought, he wrote books on, among other things, mnemonic technique , who,
following eight years of torture and interrogation, was burned at the
stake by the Inquisition in 1600, as their subject. Within the paintings,
however, references to this history – at least to those who are not
familiar with Bruno’s life that’s most people – remain relatively
obscure. A wreath of flowers, for example, might bring to mind Rome’s
Campo dei Fiori, where Bruno met his end. But perhaps it is the fact that
the powerful e ect of Simpson’s work remains intact to those who
haven’t got a care about martyrs, theology or sixteenth-century
philosophy that makes it truly worth checking out. Simpson has
increasingly come to think of these paintings as being of the vanitas
variety, but they are far more eerie and disconcerting than any ‘still
life with skull’. They recall the bench memorials that litter
Britain’s parks and squares – tombstones disguised as seating
arrangements – but also mortuary slabs, co ns, waiting rooms, balance
scales and architecture. Perhaps it is his fixed subject matter that
gives Simpson the freedom to explore the language of painting and, through
that, the depths of art’s ability to contain and communicate multilevel
narratives, obscure meaning and complex ideas. Ultimately what all that
means is that Simpson’s paintings can only be paintings and no words or
photographs can truly sum them up. MICHAEL SIMPSON EMERGED INTO THE
CONTEMPORARY ART WORLD Bench Number 64 2006 , oil paint on canvas, 244 x
518 cm. Courtesy David Risley Gallery, London Future Greats_p80-p82.indd 3
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
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