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| Raw & Loved - Exhibition in Miami |
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| Artist : | Simon Birch |
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| Date : | 9 May, 2009 - 12 June, 2009 |
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| Press Release |
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Simon Birch
Raw and Loved, AE District, Miami, May 2009
Valerie C. Doran
Hong Kong-based painter and video artist Simon Birch is best known internationally for his stylized, energized portraits, in which a broad cross-section of Hong Kong urban players are transported, one at a time, into an implicit narrative frame of Birch’s own construction. His paintings, always of a single figure lit against a dense, unarticulated background, have the captured-motion quality of a movie still: but his unstudied, vital and highly individualist paintwork—whether created with a brush or a palette knife--infuses his canvasses with a sense of interior energy, so that what is most compellingly revealed is not so much the way these people look, but the way they are shifting and changing in the moment. Among his works of urban portraiture there sometimes appears, like a silver filament, an intriguing, almost archetypal figure: a young woman unanchored in the compositional space, twisting and turning as she seems to fall through the air. Yet there is no sense that we are witnessing a victim of chance or fate here: in each manifestation, the young woman seems to have wilfully propelled herself into space, and the artist captures both the expressiveness of her gestures and her fierce, pure momentum.
A self-taught artist, Birch came of age in England’s industrial midlands, in a rough-and-tumble urban scene where underground clubbing was the main priority and graffiti the main artistic activity. Even so, there were hints of Birch’s future direction: he describes himself as having been ‘obsessed’ with the work of graphic artists such as Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz, often copying whole sections of their drawings. Eventually ‘escaping’ a negative trajectory in England and travelling to Australia and then Hong Kong, Birch indulged his growing passion for painting and studied art voraciously on his own. Birch describes himself as being fascinated by the idea of spectacle, whether in science fiction films, or circus performances, and in the last few years has referenced this fascination through the creation of installation works incorporating painting, video and performance. By Birch’s own description, the young woman falling through space in his paintings is intimately related to the idea of spectacle, having her genesis in the trapeze artist captured ‘in the moment the performer releases the beam.’
For his first solo exhibition in America, the artist has produced a new set of works to show in AE District in Miami’s design district. Implicit in Birch’s new series of paintings is the artist’s gradual realization that this young woman flying into space is his own daemon, and as an artist and a seeker, he has conceptually followed her there. Expressively and stylistically, the female figures in his new works signal a critical shift in the conceptual language of an artist, marked by a plunge from conscious control to a deeper abandonment in the painting process. Their bodies, while still clearly figurative, are progressively deconstructed into abstract fields of colour, texture and light, while their blurred countenances (echoing the work of Francis Bacon but completely dissimilar in intent), manifest a powerful inner velocity, transforming into physical motion. Thematically, Birch links these images equally to the dichotomy of control and abandon of the trapeze artist and the heroic figures of Caravaggio, another painter whom he deeply admires. For Birch, these works ultimately portray ‘that still, dramatic moment of possibility’ when beauty plunges irrevocably, either to transcendent survival, or to her doom.
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