Dexter Dalwood

Double Portrait Camden Town, 2013Oil on Canvas 150 x 220cmSimon Lee Gallery, London20 November 2014

I have been looking forward to seeing new work by Dexter Dalwood for some time and my visit to his current show at the Simon Lee Gallery (until 24 January 2015) in London didn’t disappoint.  I was keen to see how his work has changed since his exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in 2010.  He still uses the collage technique in a similar way, not only using photographic sources, but also fragments or allusions to paintings by other artists.   This collage of ideas generates an image from which he paints an imaginary 'space', but the place in this exhibition is confined to London and the subjects are more strictly personal rather than historical moments of earlier works.

The paintings seem to be about personal memories and associations of past life and times in London.  But as Jorge Luis Borges [1] points out, memories are created in the present and meanings alter slightly with things added and taken away through each recall.  I read the paintings as referencing how this process of retrieval of memory involves thinking about a memory in a new way – rather than just being a faithful record of the past.  They are an assembly of scraps of information that reconstruct Dalwood’s memories morphed through experience rather than images of a static point in time.

Double Portrait Camden Town, 2013

Oil on Canvas 150 x 220cm

Dalwood has often said that you don’t need to get the references to enjoy the work and in a recent interview for Time Out [2] challenged anyone to try.  Whilst that may be the case, I feel that knowing the references helps both understanding and enjoyment of the work and as I like nothing better than a challenge, I thought I would make the attempt for "Double Portrait Camden Town".

Looking at the painting I see two possible references immediately.  The first is that the copper coloured background with the verdigris coloured blobs is a reference to the ‘piss paintings’ of Andy Warhol.  In these works Warhol was paraphrasing Abstract Expressionism in an ironic way by randomly spraying his screen prints with urine such that the copper sulphate paint oxidised.  The painting Dalwood has used is a 1982 portrait of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat who had an obsession with Warhol and later collaborated with him. His use of a double image of the portrait is suggestive of a Rorschach ink blot used by psychologists to determine underlying personality and emotional functioning. 

Basquiat, 1982 Black photo-silkscreen over oxidized copper

The second, if I am correct, has a clearer connection to Camden Town.  The chest of drawers at the bottom of the painting reminded me of the cheap yellow-brown dresser in Walter Sickert’s painting Ennui, 1917.  I initially thought that his Camden Town Murder paintings may be the reference but the only similar dresser I could find in this orientation was in Sickert’s Mornington Crescent Nude, Contre-Jour of 1907.  However, the connection may simply be that the location of  Ennui is Sickert’s studio in Granby Street, Camden Town.

Ennui, 1914 Oil on Canvas 152x112cm

In his Time Out interview, Dalwood tells us that the painting is partly “about where Verlaine and Rimbaud lived up in Royal College Street in Camden” [3] so Ennui may well be linked to this intention.  Ennui was a recurring theme running through French literature and poetry of the nineteenth century, both as a subject and a symptom.  It is linked with melancholia; a state of emptiness that the ‘soul’ feels when it is deprived of interest in action, life and the world and featured in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), first published in 1857, 16 years before Verlaine and Rimbaud moved to Camden.

Un Coin de Table, 1872 Oil on Canvas160x225cm

Les Fleurs du mal marked the beginning of Symbolism, where symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul, as a movement in France and was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s.  The use of Symbolism in turn leads us to the two vases of flowers on the dresser.  I cannot place the source of the images for the flowers but the reference to their use may be to the painting Un coin de table, 1872 by Henri Fantin-Latour. It is a portrait of the Parnassus poetry group and shows the men are gathered around the far end of a table after a meal. Those present include: Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but two figures are missing: Charles Baudelaire, to whom the painting was initially to have been a tribute, who died in 1867 and Albert Mérat who did not want to be painted in the company of the diabolic poets Verlaine and Rimbaud and was reputedly replaced by a bunch of flowers.

Dalwood says he “wanted to make a painting about the younger protagonist and the elder, the idea that someone is mentoring someone else” and I think that the pairings are evoked perfectly albeit differently.  He also draws parallels with the hedonistic openly provocative lifestyle of the two younger men but the connection of Warhol and Basquiat to Camden is more opaque and is probably personal the portrait of Basquiat coinciding with Dalwood’s time at St. Martin’s School of Art in London.  

So the titles provides the clue and the cool treatment leaves room for the viewer’s imagination and interpretation, but I still maintain that the experience of the work will be much richer for those viewers who can make the associations between the subject and the quotations from painting’s history - I just wish I could spot them all.

©blackdog 2014

[1] “Memory changes things. Every time we remember something, after the first time, we’re not remembering the event, but the first memory of the event. Then the experience of the second memory and so on.”

Jorge Luis Borges

[2] “There's no way any one viewer will get all the references. It's not a checklist.”

Dexter Dalwood

[3]They stayed at 8 Great College Street  (now Royal College Street), where a little plaque commemorates their stay between May and July 1873. 

James Cambell

Dexter Dalwood

Ceauşescu's Execution, 2002
Oil on Canvas 268 x 347 cm

Tate Britain, London
26th February 2003

This was the first Dexter Dalwood painting I had seen and its dramatic size and bold colours gave it a lot of presence. I loved the contrast in the brushwork between thick slathers of paint in the background and the thin blended surface in the foreground. The specks of broken glass and shards of wood give depth and imply by association the event implied in the title of the painting.

I was intrigued by how successfully the painting conjured up memories of the downfall of a regime whose palaces were filled with priceless silk, porcelain, marble, silverware, and of course chandeliers, by such non-specific content.

His earlier pieces are predominantly imagined interiors of the homes of historical and contemporary figures. For example, Dalwood's painting Kurt Cobain's Greenhouse imagines the private home in Seattle where the eponymous rock singer committed suicide in 1994. These “portraits” are achieved through association with the person’s artifacts and by allusion to the time by appropriating art of the period. This work came from his desire to depict places that one had heard of but hadn't necessarily got a picture for in your head.

His painting of Ceauşescu's Execution extends that recreation of time and space to summon forth the atmosphere and implications of a historical event and marks a development of both his ideas and technique. The result is a post-modern version of the traditional history painting and I enjoyed the challenge involved in unpicking his work.

The starting point for the painting is the size; this is exactly the same dimensions as Francisco Goya’s historical painting Third May 1808 which depicts the execution by firing squad of a group of Spanish patriots by Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. The Ceauşescus were also executed by a firing squad consisting of elite paratroop regiment soldiers who shot them with AK-47 assault rifles. At first I thought this was also the source for the triangle of table top in the foreground, as there is an area of illuminated foreground in Goya’s masterpiece, but the shape is identical to the foreground in Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch Am Meer. The effect of the light under the gloom above is similar to bleakness and desolation invoked by Friedrich’s painting. Given that the splinters on the table top resemble the shards of ice in another Friedrich painting The Sea of Ice, I think the later interpretation is more likely. The hard part was the background which I thought looked like the work of Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline, yet I could see no connection with the title or the late 1980’s. Fortunately the exhibition catalogue[1] came to the rescue and the source for the “curtains” dripping with blood is a painting by Georg Baselitz titled Der Krug which was completed only months before the execution of the Ceauşescus was broadcast on television

I have since become a real fan of his work and have seen both earlier pieces at Saatchi’s Gallery in London and been to the opening night of a recent large exhibition of new paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in London. However, nothing has come close to the impact of seeing this painting for the first time and I thought it was one of the best pieces in the Triennial exhibition.

[1] Tufnel, Ben Days Like These Catalogue Tate Publishing 2003 pp64-69

©blackdog 2009