John Keane's Intelligent Design: More Paintings about War and Religion, Flowers Gallery, London
Photographs of the painter John Keane show him as unsmiling and intense. Some of his self-portraits - which include one of him walking naked through a Central American village, carrying a bloody heart - have the same feel. One half of his new exhibition, Intelligent Design, is in this spirit. The other half, though, is more playful - a dazzling series of visual conjuring tricks. Taken as a whole, it represents a departure for an artist whose career so far has been about chronicling the great political issues of his time.
The son of a stockbroker, educated at Wellington College, Keane has worked his way through what some would see as a predictable portfolio of left-liberal subjects and sites, from the Falklands to the rainforests, from Murdoch to the miners, from Northern Ireland to consumerism, urban angst to the War on Terror. He visited the Sandanistas' Nicaragua in the 1980s. In 1991 the Imperial War Museum sent him to record the Gulf War.
His painting of an image he witnessed - a Mickey Mouse doll surrounded by turds on a Kuwait beach - was attacked in a Sun leading article for its perceived criticism of British troops.
Until the end of the 1990s Keane's political concerns were expressed in a robust painterly style. His lush, thickly painted, sensual canvases treated the bland, matt surfaces of contemporary life - computer screens, keyboards, mobile phones, even the spokes of supermarket trolleys - with the richness and exuberance of human flesh.
Now Keane has left his early style behind. In his 2006 exhibition Fifty Seven Hours in the House of Culture, he manipulated stills from a television documentary about the seizure of more than 800 hostages in a Moscow theatre by Chechen rebels, which he used to confront the emerging issue of Muslim terrorism. The same year his New York exhibition Guantanamerica took iconic images of Muslim prisoners at Guantánamo Bay as raw material for a meditation on submission, dehumanisation and torture.
Echoing a documentary trend in film, the novel and theatre, Keane's new collection continues to draw its subject matter from current events. But as an exhibition Intelligent Design echoes another current obsession of the storytelling arts: variation and juxtaposition. Like many contemporary novels and plays, it puts radically disparate elements together and invites the viewer to join up the dots.
Half of it is made up of seemingly abstract pieces, with the repetitive symmetry of a Rorschach blot, concealing bugs, breasts, bears and beards (the latter belonging, in many case, to a concealed but familiar image of Charles Darwin). The blots are echoed in images of butterflies, whose wings with eye spots raise a fascinating evolutionary question: we see the markings as eyes, but did predators, and, if so, did it put them off? How much are we hard-wired to register only the familiar? What is the line between the threatening, the fascinating and the beautiful?..
Read entire article at Times (UK)
The son of a stockbroker, educated at Wellington College, Keane has worked his way through what some would see as a predictable portfolio of left-liberal subjects and sites, from the Falklands to the rainforests, from Murdoch to the miners, from Northern Ireland to consumerism, urban angst to the War on Terror. He visited the Sandanistas' Nicaragua in the 1980s. In 1991 the Imperial War Museum sent him to record the Gulf War.
His painting of an image he witnessed - a Mickey Mouse doll surrounded by turds on a Kuwait beach - was attacked in a Sun leading article for its perceived criticism of British troops.
Until the end of the 1990s Keane's political concerns were expressed in a robust painterly style. His lush, thickly painted, sensual canvases treated the bland, matt surfaces of contemporary life - computer screens, keyboards, mobile phones, even the spokes of supermarket trolleys - with the richness and exuberance of human flesh.
Now Keane has left his early style behind. In his 2006 exhibition Fifty Seven Hours in the House of Culture, he manipulated stills from a television documentary about the seizure of more than 800 hostages in a Moscow theatre by Chechen rebels, which he used to confront the emerging issue of Muslim terrorism. The same year his New York exhibition Guantanamerica took iconic images of Muslim prisoners at Guantánamo Bay as raw material for a meditation on submission, dehumanisation and torture.
Echoing a documentary trend in film, the novel and theatre, Keane's new collection continues to draw its subject matter from current events. But as an exhibition Intelligent Design echoes another current obsession of the storytelling arts: variation and juxtaposition. Like many contemporary novels and plays, it puts radically disparate elements together and invites the viewer to join up the dots.
Half of it is made up of seemingly abstract pieces, with the repetitive symmetry of a Rorschach blot, concealing bugs, breasts, bears and beards (the latter belonging, in many case, to a concealed but familiar image of Charles Darwin). The blots are echoed in images of butterflies, whose wings with eye spots raise a fascinating evolutionary question: we see the markings as eyes, but did predators, and, if so, did it put them off? How much are we hard-wired to register only the familiar? What is the line between the threatening, the fascinating and the beautiful?..