Heart of Darkness (solo show)
The title refers to the book by Joseph Conrad in which the
motif of darkness recurs throughout the novel to reflect the
"primal darkness" against the ‘light of civilization’
and the ambiguity of both; the dark motives of civilisation,
the freedom of the primal, as well as spiritual darkness.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was inspired by
the book where an assassin undertakes an odyssey up a river
to terminate with ‘extreme prejudice’ a rogue
commander (played by Marlon Brando) who has over-identified
with the military system to such an extent that he is able
to truly understand and oppose its horrors and in the epic
tradition of Homer and the myth of Orpheus journey’s
into the darkness of the human soul.
Gordon Cheung has conceived his first solo show of new paintings
in Brazil as a retranslation of this archetypal story converging
it with our contemporary existence at the dawn of the new
millenium. The communications and digital revolutions collapsed
notions of time and distance into the instant reconfiguring
our perceptions of time and space into a state of flux. 90s
Utopic euphoria of the digital frontiers, information superhighways,
cyberspace and global villages gave way to technophobic hysteria
of apocalypse from the Millenium Bug along with the technology
stock and dot com bubble crash. We entered the new millenia
with one threatening wave of apocalypse after another with
Enron and Worldcom corrupting and collapsing along with the
911 attacks, a global War on Terror while the world also grappled
with it’s fragile relationship to nature itself.
In Cheung’s paintings the Financial Times stock listings
are used as a metaphor for a globalised virtual space that
literally saturates and interlinks our lives. Essentially
the paintings can be understood as a hyper-paint-by-number
depicting a virtual landscape oscillating between Utopia and
Dystopia, Heaven and the Underworld. The paintings fragmentary
multi-layered nature seeks to provide deconstructive pathways
to peel the fractures in the glossy surfaces of modern life
so that we might slip beyond to question the emergent patterns
and shadowy underbelly of what shapes our world. Cheung invites
us to undertake a journey through his paintings and reflect
on our techno-sublime world flickering our perceptions of
realities between the virtual and actual.
Catalogue available
30 Nov 2006 - 31 Jan 2007
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