GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
GORDON CHEUNG
Galleria 1/9 unosunove arte contemporanea
Gordon Cheung mixes decadence of apparel with a special taste
of paradise. The artist plants allegories and leaves others to
gather them. Using a mix of techniques he retranslates the prints
of John Martin, created for the original edition of John Milton’s
Paradise Lost, the departure point of this exhibition. The poem’s
illustrations are revised, corrected and reproduced in technicolour,
animated by his use of spray paint, ink and acrilic used like
oil paint, to highlight that the disfiguration of the nature that
surrounds us is so extensive that we it has projected us into
an irreversible process. In a post-nucleur landspace Gordon Cheung
depicts a paradoxical nature emerging from craters and psychedelic
rocks, and the ruins of an indecipherable world which is almost
always covered or surmounted by a circular form like a spiritual
aura whose presence serves to reassure us a little. The exhibition
‘God is on our Side’ encapsulates ideas which float
in timeless incorporealty. Conceived as a triple discourse on
the idea of power, the sovereignty of faith and the impotence
of humanity, the works in the three rooms unmask the prevalence
of money and our slavery to profit and the flux of the markets.
With veiled reference to the global war on terror, the artist
denounces the ease with which we invoke the divine as a justification
for recent military actions. Without imposing any form of dogma,
he depicts religion as mere excuse to legitimise illegal interventions.
Gordon Cheung’s lastest works are of impressive dimension.
The exhibition opens with a site-specific installation of 24 works
(50 x 60cm) highlighted against a single wall, portraying the
various chapters of Paradise Lost. The series evokes the celebrated
Miltonic poem and invites us to formulate our position vis-à-vis
the rebel angels, liberally reinterpreting and simplifying themes.
Milton undeniably sympathised with Satan, examining a failed ideal
to try and reconcile the pagan and Christian traditions. The latter
had had proved incapable of offering answers to arduous teleological
questions about fate, predestination. The Trinity is negated in
favour of the figures of the son and a rather sarcastic father.
Cheung views the present on a metaphorical and symbolic level,
which is never didactic or moralistic. Leave Eve to look in her
mirror and fall in love with herself, while the pyschedelia and
hallucinations of the surrounding landscape change Nature into
something prismatic that assails us all as we seek to reconcile
art with the real world. The artists works are founded on a series
of sucessively more inaccesible places. The future is shrouded
in mystery with a decisive warning about paying attention to the
heart of things, the real significant fulcrum of events before
confronting them and preparing ourselves. Whether positive or
negative.
The phrase ‘Paradise Lost’ has become representative
of a system in progress. The title is used as simile for contemporary
society, as in Mark Ravenhill’s fantastical play of the
same title presented in the Edinburgh Festival, a condensed corroboration
of the perils of our present in 20 minutes of choppy, staccato
prose. In ‘Pandomonium’, a word first employed by
Milton, Lucifer uses his powers of rhetoric to give orders, supported
by his faithful lieutenants, Mammon and Beelzebub. The poem begins
in media res after Lucifer and the other rebel angels have been
exiled to Hell by God. After some discussion Satan decides that
he will become the poisoner of the newly-founded earth. Above
all, the Fall has a destabilizing effect and its repercussions
are found throughout Cheung’s work; although his vision
is of a world altered by mankind. Order does not exist; nor does
the possibility of invoking, evoking, imagining or creating it.
The artist makes reference to science fiction and evokes Ulysses
and the Aeniad in the infernal regions of the Underworld. Every
canvas is prepared with a background of the stock listings of
the Financial Times, an English newspaper which has always been
an precise point of reference about the state of the economic
world and is moreover, highly esteemed and feared for the reviews
on the arts in general. Having prepared the base with the English
paper, the artist covers the background with a calibrated amount
of spray paint which he painstakingly prepares to produce colour
tones which are commercially unavailable. In this way he obtains
the unique chromatic effect which is the hallmark of his style,
using the repeated numerals of stock listings to describe and
make us reflect upon the money which surrounds every transaction.
The regression that society is undergoing is a conjugation of
frustrated expectations and the last luxury that we can afford
ourselves is to indulge in romanticisim about the destruction
that we are wreaking: we empathise with the devil because we understand
the nature of the conflict, the everyday struggle against hell.
Eve’s desire permitted us to understand temptation and if
the angels try to redeem her then they themselves must fall. This
infernal council will not suceed at guiding her, and beyond there
awaits a luminous landscape. For us there remains the vision of
an everyday where the sun never sets in the depths. Anything can
happen, but the stars continue to shine.
Raffaella Guidobono
Essay by Raffaella Guidobono for the catalogue
of his solo exhibition at Galleria 1/9 unosunove arte contemporanea,
Rome Italy Nov 2007
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