Tetsuya Ishida @ Gagosian Paris

Tetsuya Ishida, Recalled, 1998

Tetsuya Ishida paintings are filled with alienated young men, merging with machines, becoming them, dissected and packed in boxes, bodies trapped by buildings. The figures are tragic and yet, curiously identifiable. As the exhibition press release says, Ishida's style has a socialist realist tone and form, but at the same time, the figures fall into the surrealist nightmares of René Magritte. Most obviously the narratives reminded of Kafka's office workers consumed not always by institutions, but here, by machines, technology, and consumerism. 

Tetsuya Ishida, Convenience Store Mother and Child, 1996

One of the most disturbing aspects of Ishida's figures is that they are often sleeping, or catatonic, only ever active when limbs have become machine parts. Even then, the young men are comatose, at the will of the machine, everyday appliances, or architectural structures. Ishida's is a world in which human is no longer awake and machine has taken over. And worse, there is no attempt to challenge their colonisation. The young men and their machines also often occupy raked spaces, at times giving the impression that the figures are on their way to falling out of the painting. Otherwise, the spaces contribute to the surrealist tenor, suggesting that they are inside a staged performance, having lost all connection to authentic behaviour. 

Tetsuya Ishida, Gripe, 1997

While the paintings discourse on the alienation and mechanisation of daily life in urban 1990s Japan, anxiety and isolation brought about by economic decline and the so-called lost generation, their prescience of Western countries today is uncanny. Apparently, the paintings show predominantly Ishida's self image struggling with mental illness, alienation, and anxiety. However, the depressive mood and mechanical metamorphosis is easily identifiable to anyone working in a repetitive and repressive structural situations. The paintings show a world in which obedience and conformity are not negotiable, where the ability to negotiate has long been lost.

 

Tetsuya Ishida, Interview, 1998

Adding to these Kafkaesque nightmares is the common presence of animals in the paintings. Once again the young male figures are enveloped by animals, usually of the insect type: cockroaches, lizards, walruses, animals with claws and tusks made to trap a body. The disquieting proximity of these terrifying scenarios to our own existence aside, this exhibition is a great introduction to an artist who for me, and I imagine many others in Europe, was previously unknown.

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part @ Gagosian Paris

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part
Installation @ Gagosian

Blue is the colour of life and death in Sterling Ruby's sumptuous works seen through the window of Gagosian's rue de Castiglione space. Multi-media collages in lazulite blue, furious scrawls, water stained paper, and the reminder of flowers blown in the wind fill the walls behind human-sized bronze sculptures  of dead flowers painted blue. The flowers are mostly sunflowers charred with their heads bowed, what semblance of leaves disfigured by the elements. All of the flowers are in couples, bound together at their bases. Alternatively, they look at each other, their "faces" turned inwards, admiring each other.

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part
Installation @ Gagosian

The flowers are somewhere between life and death. As the exhibition title suggests and the blurb confirms, they are saying their wedding vows, till death us do part. Beyond the obvious references to the mayhem and turbulence of life, the richness (and expressiveness) of art through the use of blue, if we anthropomorphise the flowers, and the traces of life in the paper collages, these sculptures are overflowing with emotion. In them, we see agony, the love of flowers that are bound together, the fragility and transience of life, sadness at the anticipation of passing. We also witness an energy swirling around the sculptures, as they weather their surroundings with dignity.

Sterling Ruby, Ghosts (9181), 2026

In Ghosts (9181), winds with the intensity of hurricanes batter the page and the vulnerable flowers in the corner. It is as though they have disintegrated before the storm is over. In Ghosts (9182), the threat has been and gone across fields of blue scrawls, having ripped through and left its traces in the form of diluted colour. Here, the flowers have escaped the path of the extreme event, but they are not without mourning and loss of their petals. 

Sterling Ruby, Ghosts (9182), 2926

While the marriage of the mixed media collages and bronze sculptures is unique and the different media are intimately entwined, I couldn't help finding the dead sunflowers expressing the undulations of human life to be, if not derivative of Anselm Kiefer's, at least, something that Kiefer has already done. That said, the small group of works is - as always for Gagosian's installations - beautifully exhibited. The works are powerful, and being inside the space gives the feeling of being inside a much larger world, a feeling made possible by the range of emotions and the intensity of their differences. 

Leonora Carrington @ Musée de Luxembourg

Leonora Carrington, Feeding the Table, 1959

The Leonora Carrington Exhibition at the Musée de Luxembourg is stunning. The curation, the paintings, the flow of the exhibition, all come together to show the extraordinary work of this exceptional artist. Carrington is not unknown to anyone in the art world, and neither is she a stranger to the discourse on surrealism. But she did not enjoy the renown of her friend Max Ernst, of course, because she was a woman.

Leonora Carrington, Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, 1975

The exhibition includes her early notebooks and drawings. From the age of ten Carrington was filling pages with magical and mythical creatures in wild and wonderful narratives. There's no doubt that she had the most extraordinary imagination that becomes developed into intricately detailed, brilliantly coloured stories in which creatures morph and diverge across canvases, all somehow speaking to the others.   

Leonora Carrington, Artes 110, 1944

The exhibition text emphasizes the ardent feminism of Carrington's work, propelled by her suffering at the abuse of her father and brother. Her paintings show both the domination of women in the scowling faces of evil men and fallen women as well as the empowering levitation of women escaping the real world. The paintings are filled with anger and remorse, magic tricks and Greek legends. But what is most astounding are the figures; long, lean, with skeletal hands and feet, often emphasized. It is not always immediately obvious - because masculine and feminine are not always distinct - that the paintings are about pain and suffering. They often have a whimsical, joyful, at times humorous streak to them, encouraging us to laugh and smile at their playfulness. 

Leonora Carrington, The Lovers, 1987

Throughout the oeuvre, we see animals as the face of humanity, keeping women company, offering a place to sit, sharing the experience, comforting.  A head becomes three animal heads, a bird perched on a cow, or a pig asleep in a corner delight us with their imaginative depictions. Alternatively, animals are given the role of humans where men are noticeably absent or threatening. Often there was so much going on in the paintings that the cuteness of the animals was only discovered in time. But animals are also there to protect Leonora if we assume that many of the women are indeed, representations of her. Rabbits, cats, birds and other animals encircle her, a duck and a reindeer are dinner guests in Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, and various animals are more than onlookers in The Lovers. While they animals can take centre stage, they also come along for the ride. Often. like the presence of animals, the most compelling part of a painting is not the one that takes up the most space. In The Temptation of St Antoine, for example, the women holding the dress of the queen are vivid in their individuality.

Leonora Carrington, The Temptation of Ste Antoine, 1945

Despite the fanciful imaginative worlds, there are also erudite references to the great traditions of past art. Two curious figures peering over the top of the wall watching the woman feeding a bird are clearly drawing on the putti, angels, and children watching scenes of battle, beheading, and ascension in the Renaissance. The colourful dresses if the women holding the queen's dress in The Temptation of Ste Antoine remind of explorations in the same period, when new colours were being made possible and wealthy patrons were eager to see their wealth on display. Or the narratives that run across her Mars Red Predella, clearly referencing the surreptitious narratives of the form in its classical iterations.

Leonora Carrington, Mars Red Predella, 1947

While there were plenty of wizards and witches and all manner of beings ready to attack, overall, there was such joy in the paintings. Carrington was a committed feminist, vociferously speaking out about the madness she experienced under male domination, and yet, as I say, the stories she tells are always playful and sometimes funny, and there were moments of real lightness. As I walked around the exhibition, I couldn't help lamenting that feminism and identity politics today seems to have lost this ability to find different registers of criticism.