UNSTABLE RELATIONS 2012

acrylic on canvas

Unstable Relations: the paired portraits 

Unstable Relations are a series of double portraits, paint on canvas, based on a single black and white photograph of the artist aged around 9 years old. There is nothing remarkable about the original photograph except that the boy (the artist) is wearing a shirt and tie and has a particularly unsympathetic haircut - yet these two features seem to take the image out of the specific and into the general: it could have been any young boy from anytime between the 1930s and the 1970s. It was this that fascinated: the implications of the specific memory of a specific moment for the artist conflated with an historicism that was as much to do with fiction, history lessons, tv and movies, as well as the archival. Nostalgia and history seemed to pour out of, and into, this image. To further occupy this territory, particularly between the photographic, the paintings are given a red glaze which adds to their paranoiac presence, while suggesting the otherness of the archive image being caught under the developer’s light. It is this movement of memory and fiction that makes the image so unstable and imprecise.