Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Michael Raphael Gilfedder
I paint in a stream of consciousness manner that attempts to convey an authentic sense of self, and how I feel in the moment, relying on associative thought processes somewhat akin to how we think and move in our daily lives. This is the purest approach to painting that makes sense to me, although much of what I paint is meticulously planned and methodical too, working from a division of labour using techniques pioneered by the old masters.
Within this practice I include visual references to brutalist architectural and sculptural forms as devices that formally resolve and connect other elements and interpret how they may be transformed into a moment of poetic sensuality when merged with painting. I am interested in how digital imaging affects analog painting by rendering with paint the functions of digital clone and eraser tools, drop shadows and gradients. The logic of Photoshop or pixelation shapes my approach to colour, form, depth, shade, tone, volume; all the parameters that guide the application of paint to canvas.
Drawing inspiration from the proximity of my upbringing to a military complex in the Outer Hebrides and the Gàidhlig I once spoke, my work is suffused with melancholy and nostalgia in which images flow dreamlike between pop culture, politics and psychology in a disparate, multitudinous, cut and paste manner. Ultimately, my approach to painting is the desire to expand consciousness by scattering images in an archival way, replicating systems such as cybernetics or ecosystems that will enhance the experience of a painting’s narrative qualities.
WARGASMS DEGREE SHOW INSTALLATION.
Wargasms is an immersive installation of new works which reflect a stream of consciousness approach to painting. The works bristle with motifs, a playability with materiality and curved forms that create a sense of flow and movement in their setting. The installation exhibits signature visual qualities of brutalism, post-analog painting, comic iconoclasm and postmodernism.
Wargasms merges a visual engagement with my own history, referencing an upbringing in the Outer Hebrides beside a military complex and its subsequent links to the Gulf Wars, and ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Like Picasso’s Guernica, Wargasms is an overtly political statement and a lament against the violence of today’s world.
Further references extend to the heterotopic philosophies of Michel Foucault. The motifs within the installation act as a reflection on Foucault’s theory on resemblance whereby things scattered through the universe can answer one another. According to Foucault, emulation is a sort of twinship existing in things. These concepts are interpreted through the figures within the paintings by duplication. The figures resemble one another completely, without it being possible for anyone to say which one of them brought its similitude to the other.
The installation is accompanied by a soundtrack released specifically for the work presented and is a compilation of tracks I have released over time that attempt to add “tone” or a type of musicality to the archival nature of the imagery – much like an Adam Curtis documentary or programmes during the 90s such as World in Action. The audio aspect is suffused with melancholy and is preoccupied with the way in which technology materialises memory.
Within Wargasms, I have attempted to find a common element, a common philosophy, that ties paintings together. A philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and making paintings at any cost to improve and remodel the world.
