Mary Mary, Glasgow
January 25-March 15
There's something missing from Alan Reid's second show of paintings at
Mary Mary. Anyone familiar with the already hazy façades of the
Texan-born artist's work will recall how much it has been dominated by
the figure of a woman, aloof, enigmatic and as studiedly bored as a
1970s 'Jackie' magazine mannequin, soft-focused, dappled pink and
insipid. As the title of this new show points to, the lady has vanished
from the scene, leaving a trail of clues that suggests that she might
in fact just be hiding.
“It’s an exhibition designed to convey an absent character,” Reid
explains. “ A show without a subject. My previous shows used images of
women extensively, so I thought it would be interesting to hint at her
presence, without showing. Something like all those cinematic clichés
of lipstick on glass, or a newspaper left on a park bench, or a bra
thrown over a lampshade…The paintings are basically non-functioning
clocks. A model’s face replaced by a clock’s face.”
Centrepiece of the show is 'La Notte (1961)', a three wall mural
depicting the debris of things left behind; a moustache, a pair of
glasses, a mask. These are hidden further when set against columns of
giraffe spot patterns in a piece named after Italian auteur
Michelangelo Antonioni's 1961 film about a disintegrating marriage.
Is the missing woman, then, the other woman, and where has she gone?
“The thing you have to understand,” Reid says, “what I’m involved with
is both philosophy and a soap opera. I hope she hasn’t vanished
completely. She’ll reappear. I’m dependent on the emotional potential
of those images; they both educate me and loosen some calcified
feeling. But making that work is a bear.
The List, January 2014
ends
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