![]() Through the depiction of faces, Becker’s picture expands the traditional topos of still life, incorporating portraiture. Just as anthropomorphic suggestiveness runs through this cryptic landscape of Cézanne, abstracted heads appear to be seething across the blue and green background of Becker’s “Still Life”, a painting that slyly deconstructs the genre denoted by its title, multiplying semantic possibilities. Whereas the background palette of “Still Life” also evokes the upper sector of Cézanne’s “Portrait of a Peasant” (1904-6) of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the films of colour of Becker bring to mind the “secondary images” of Cézanne that we find, for example, in “Rocks Near the Caves above the Château Noir” (circa 1904) of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Though the themes, mediums and factures of these two paintings thoroughly differ, one connection between them is the viewer’s tenuous temptation to detect mirages of uncanny, semi-human and semi-animal forms that lurk throughout the trees, architecture and sky within Cézanne’s painting and across Becker’s backdrop, where cryptic, “secondary images” are potentially present. In Becker’s paintings, the ersatz doppelganger and singularity operate inseparably so as to usurp reductive readings of the self.Ī number of self-portraits executed in 20 as part of a larger cycle with diverse themes reveal the artist’s undeniable conviction in the possibilities of figurative painting, whereby references to modern and contemporary works of art often triangulate aesthetic artifacts, selfhood and primordiality.Ī cultic aura overlooks the diaphanous backdrop of “Still Life” (2019-20), where the gestural brushwork in shades of teal and blue-green is in captivating dialogue with so many of the enigmatic paintings of Paul Cézanne, such as “Château Noir” (1903-4) of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet the femme fatale of Allen Jones has become paired with an armless male mannequin in the foreground, at once neutralizing outmoded definitions of gender and forging a multivocal pictorial representation of taxonomies of gender. Here the whimsical backdrop is a surreal, starry sky rendered in shades of midnight blue and accentuated by heavenly bodies in bright red. In this intriguing painting, the sculptural furniture of Jones appears on a graffitied boulder that acts as a plinth within a biomorphic golf course. ![]() Becker’s “Midnight at the Mini Golf”, (Top Photo) a painting dated 2020, portrays the notorious, ironic and undeniably amusing furniture piece “Table” of Allen Jones, produced in an edition of six in 1969. The perceptively formulated and compelling paintings of Becker expansively synthesize the historical and fictional, solipsism and irony, persistently sublimating such verbal compartmentalisation into pictures for the viewer to interrogate and liberally unfold. Accordingly, the whimsical, urban and suburban landscapes inventively fashioned by Becker operate as surreal theatrical sets, where depictions of real and imaginary actors and artworks enact preoccupations simultaneously inherent to the ontology of human existence and primeval inquiries of artmaking. So strange and yet so familiar in its reference to the history of art, the artworld and the echelons of bygone and contemporary societies, Becker’s gripping iconography in “The Collector’s Ranch” also recalls the pictorial language of Neo Rauch-an innovative visual language that is a synthesis of Surrealism and Socialist Realism. While the complex composition is predominated by the two Victorian dandies on the left featuring black top hats, Becker’s three houses rendered in robust shades of red, along with a plethora of greens, yellows and blues that recur throughout the painting, recall the blazing palettes of Henri Matisse and David Hockney. ![]() Notwithstanding its ostentatious colouration and jocular rendition, the painting’s central figure in the company of a dog-flaunting a doublet and breaches in lurid pink-is derived from Diego Velázquez’s “Dwarf with a Dog” (circa 1645) in the Prado Museum in Madrid. So strange and yet so familiar in its reference to the history of artĮngaged with their cellphones and walking hastily across this dreamscape, two modishly dressed men sporting pink suits and tangerine briefcases are portrayed on each side of the foreground of “The Collector’s Ranch”. Noah Becker, “The Collector’s Ranch”, also titled “The Valley”, 2019-20.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |