Matthew Hindley’s Amnesia (2009) is on view at iArt Wembley until 23 September.
Since his solo show in Cape Town just on three years ago, this nifty little exhibition in the iArt Wembley’s pleasant new Project Room for Contemporary Art confirms the artist as a swashbuckling knight in shining armour.
Cheered on by dark humour and wit, Hindley delivers deft sword-strokes in the rescue of contemporary painting.
Having spent some fruitful time in Berlin, he is working on a larger scale, drawing more on the potential small dramatics of human figurative situations while exploring the potential of paint (in this case both oil and acrylic) on canvas, to be a conveyor of dense, original story-telling.
Each picture can be read as a still from a cinematic tale that extends to both ends of that moment.
In fact, Hindley’s skill is the way he charges those scenes for each viewer to invent and imagine both the before and after, using the medium of paint and its illustrative means.
Framing most of the new scenarios in tightly constructed compositional planes - which, of course, heighten their theatrical impact, he has summoned a number of characters to laze around, and engage in some seemingly pointless lounging rituals, that could be dangerous or not.
A vacuous girl stares forlornly - the very pop statue of Amnesia, and a smoking, sullen woman is hopelessly afloat in her thoughts. In these paintings, animals are counterfoils for the quiet human dread.
The present exhibition of six pictures, we are told, relate to the pop singer Britney Spears’s 2008 album, Circus.
The banality of pop lyrics, which act as titles for the paintings, and the association with the superficial celebrity culture throw an ironic gloom over the seemingly harmless, even senseless scenes.
The absurdity of a dancing chimpanzee in the title painting accentuates the gallery viewer’s disquiet as possible voyeur.
But for all our engagement with these domestic futilities, Hindley’s drawcard is his way with the medium. In the big, bold Kill the Lights! we are left knowing that this is paint doing its job.
A glorious, shimmering blank canvas hanging above a couch makes its own humourous comment. Go and look. Here’s a painting saviour at work.
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Melvyn Minnaar
This article appeared in 14 September’s The Cape Times, page 9.
View Image Gallery - Matthew Hindley: Like, like, like, like a circus