Damien Meade

CAR Gallery is pleased to present the third solo exhibition at the gallery by Damien Meade (born 1969, Ireland), comprising of an important body of new works made for the occasion. Each canvas is what remains, in painting, of a clay sculpture he made that no longer exists:
the artist’s process begins with innumerable heads and figures modelled, manipulated and photographed, often kneaded back into undifferentiated matter within a few hours, until one of them holds his gaze long enough to impose its own pictorial transposition. This working method draws its origin and meaning from the awareness that oil paint and clay are both mineral matters reduced to powder and suspended in a fluid binder. Painting a clay model therefore means replicating its existence through a chemically kindred substance, a material short circuit that is decisive for the artist’s poetics. From an iconographic point of view, Meade’s research inscribes itself within a millennial lineage that moves from a conception of artistic creation as an act capable of breathing life into the work – to which both the earliest idols and cult images and today’s artificial intelligences are traceable. His works – alive and dead, archaic and futuristic, regal and residual – materialize on the canvas a liminal condition between opposing states that refuse to resolve themselves into one another. In the portraits, Meade reinterprets without historicist nostalgia the lexicon of power and status from the European portrait tradition – from Piero della Francesca to Rembrandt – bending it to a presentiment of misfortune that makes it an instrument for reading the present. His heads are effigies of an anonymous and ephemeral referent that seem to hail from an era of rigid hierarchies while simultaneously announcing the imminence of a new feudal order, that of oligarchs and machines. The two large figures in the exhibition continue a previous cycle centered on a triptych of embryonic women conceived as Shakespearean witches: direct descendants of that group, here they dance alone in the dark, an image of obstinate survival and, at the same time, of the mystery of artistic gestation. In the paintings, illumination always comes from the left, as in Western religious painting from Beato Angelico onward, obeying a convention that makes the trajectory of divine light coincide with the direction of reading and writing. The eye encounters first the solidity of the illuminated form, then slips into the darkness that consumes it, an optical grammar that confers upon the subject the status of icon. Threshold-entities shaped through a pre-logical procedure, Meade’s figures seem to return our gaze only to leave us alone, in that exchange, with the question of what, exactly, we are looking at.