'The Bon Viveur', 2008
Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cms
In his sumptuously decadent and delightfully witty work on view at the Dicksmith Gallery until March 22nd, Edward Kay alludes to, references and directly appropriates important historical paintings. On an immediate level, his paintings are contemporary answers to important images of the Rococo period and other 18th and 19th century schools. But imitation is not the highest compliment he pays to his predecessors. Kay's real gift to the images he fondly re-formulates is the invigorating injection of humor that he uses to reawaken the pleasure of looking at what he describes as "manky old paintings."
Kay's paintings are the artistic equivalent of 'Dorian,' Will Self's updated version of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey. Like Self, Kay has taken quintessential elements of decadence, depravity, cleverness and charm from his exalted originals, and tweaked them to raise their intensity. But unlike updated historical masterpieces by other artists or literary figures, the most compelling competent of Kay's oeuvre is his refusal to re-contextualize his imagery. Kay keeps his references contemporary and does not try to force them into today's style or setting. Instead, his images look as though they are actual Dorian Grey portraits of the original paintings. So that while Boucher's art sits in the Frick where it is given serious consideration, over at the Dicksmith Gallery there are paintings which bear the mark of Boucher's suppressed silliness.
Kay, who graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, in 2002 before attending the Royal Academy in London and receiving a Masters in painting, manages to get his paint brush under the layers of authority swaddling serious paintings, and tenderly tickles out the joyful, silly, creepy and viscerally enjoyable aspects of art history.
Kay uses not only his own sense of humor to update art history, he also liberally employs Disney and other old masters of cartooning's own artistic history like smelling salts to wake up traditional painting, and to jolt viewers into admitting associations they probably tried to suppress or deny when they looked at Boucher or Fragonard in art history class. Kay's renderings of Disney signatures, especially the plump red and white mushrooms found littering woodland scenes in Disney's classic movies, act as a reminder than Disney was a "real artist" and that he was greatly influenced by traditional art history.
Though at first glance Kay's paintings seem like a perfectly proportioned cocktail of Post-Modernism, mixing pop-culture with art history, they develop deeper significance when a viewer meets Kay himself. When Kay was a student at the Ruskin, he traveled into London with fellow student Dora Wade to see a show curated by Michael Archer, the distinguished arts writer and Head of the Ruskin. Along the way, Wade tape-recorded Kay describing the trip. His narration of the journey was so entertaining that she presented the tape for a class crit as her piece of sound art. "It was her idea," explains Archer. "Though of course she knew very well that it was only possible to do it because Ed would do it so well."
'Self in Conversation with the Divine', 2008
Oil on canvas, 140 x 110 cms
Indeed, Kay's comic ability means that those who talk with him regret not rigging up a video recorder before the conversation in order to capture its visual as well as verbal brilliance. With his elastic features, Kay can stretch his classically handsome face within seconds from a position of perfect poise into a range of goofy, ominous, charming and silly expressions, and then spring back into an almost icy visage of the archetypical English gentleman. And although Kay presents only one nude self-portrait at Dicksmith, his ability to embody an almost anachronistic ideal of male elegance and complete daffiness makes all of his paintings seem like psychological self-portraits.
We met for the first time at the Dicksmith Gallery, where Kay first showed work in 2005.
Edward Kay
Until 22 March
Dicksmith Gallery
Unit 27B
1-13 Adler Street
London E1 1EG
AFH: Are you doing to be insulted if I tell you that your paintings remind me of Disney?
EK: Of course not, Disney is really important. And so are other artists from that era, or before. I am not sure who those other artists were who were part of the early Technicolor cartoon history, including some of the banned cartoons that are now considered inappropriate because they are racist, or xenophobic, but they are also influences.
AFH: And how does Rococo relate to racist Disney-era imagery?
EK: I feel like Boucher relates strongly to Disney. It is not as simple as referring to it as a cartoon painting style, because Disney is quite sophisticated in its draftsmanship. Well, not 'quite' but very sophisticated. But I really think that if you go to the Wallis collection and look at some of the Boucher paintings there, you will find that the cows, shepardesses and greenery can be so incredibly Disney. It is uncanny. It can be really almost spooky. There is even a particular cow that looks like Daisy, with hay coming out of the side of her mouth and droopy eyelids with long, curled, eyelashes. It is amazing. I really love that look, and the little choppy marks he makes. I really love his paintings.
AFH: What are the drug references about?
EK: I also love the hallucinogenic nature of his paintings. His painting is referenced, rather obscurely, in my painting called "The Losers." But I really admire his swirling, hallucinatory nature. Which is why I painted him, for "Francois Boucher tripping his tits off", on the other side, with dilated pupils tripping under the influence of the other mushrooms that cropped up elsewhere in the room. You can read across the room and see the connection.
'The Losers' 2008
Oil on canvas, 140 x 110 cms
AFH: And since those mushrooms are a metaphor for your creative process, are you then pointing out that, through your work, you've appropriated and intoxicated Boucher?
EK: I suppose so. Though I think I am just using somebody as a way to associate with history, so it taps in and has that human element rather being solely subjective or associated with subliminal, automatic imagery. Otherwise, you become like "The Losers." You become completely subjective and you can't create anything or raise yourself up to make anything transcendental or even interesting out of the work. I think it is good if there is a foothold somewhere. There needs to be a historical key.
AFH: Do you think that our era is particularly comparable to the era when Boucher was painting? Are you drawing a link, say, between the decadence or attention to surface in our day and his?
EK: Yes, sure. Definitely. But there is a difference in how we paint. In a way the difference is very simple, because he was in service to the King, and my painting is only in service to myself, and my own ego.
'Francois Boucher Tripping His Tits Off', 2008
Oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cms
AFH: Are there overtly and self-consciously autobiographic elements in the images?
EK: "The Bon Viveur" and "The Protector" are very much about my personal history. I always associated "The Bon Viveur" with my father, very loosely obviously. But it is a self-portrait as well. It is all about - getting what you can, on your own terms. It is about concentrating, holding your breath and really directing your energies towards changing yourself. And then when I hung the show, I felt that there was that one on one end of the room, and "The Protector" on the other, and then we obviously pulling in very opposite directions. But then my mother recently told me that "The Protector" was my stepfather. I hadn't realized it at all, but she told me "it looks exactly like your step-father." I had not thought about it at all, but I find it really funny that those two male characters were positioned at either end of the room.
'The Protector', 2008
Oil on canvas,
80 x 95 cms
AFH: Were these images representative of your parental figures' personalities, or not so much?
EK: No. No, not really.
AFH: The relationship is just to certain physical similarities?
EK: But they act as those figures within the show. Just as I think that there is a foothold within a greater story of the painters and painted, there is also a foothold within the smaller story, which is of equal if not greater importance to me, of the real world and real meanings. The funny thing is that I hadn't really seen that until I spoke to my Mum on the phone and she said, "do you know who that is?"
AFH: Isn't it mothers' jobs to do things like that?
EK: It is really amazing to me that I hadn't noticed that I had done that. It is very pleasing to me though.
AFH: Well, from an outsider's perspective those characters make sense in relation to the paintings. It makes sense that the "Bon Viveur" image evokes a sense of unchecked urges, and perhaps a biological propensity towards decadence or self-indulgence. Whereas "The Protector" represents the real, though not necessarily biological, role of a parent; to teach, protect, guide and discipline children. Whether or not you intended it, it makes sense outside your personal narrative.
EK: Yet it happened organically. They appeared that way. Magically, it worked out as I had meant it to in a subconscious way, or at least a way that is beyond my control. Sometimes, it seems really indulgent to set yourself up, or prepare yourself, to make paintings that have a personal integrity, but then it can just come out.
AFH: Your previous work was a lot more violent than what you are doing now. Why is that?
EK: The zombie paintings were metaphors for painting. Almost everything I do is about painting.
AFH: Really? Looking at the flat, perfectly metered-out surfaces of your paintings, I'd think they were more about drawing than painting.
EK: That is a very good point. Draftsmanship and drawing is of the utmost importance to me.
AFH: How are the zombie paintings comments on the activity of painting?
EK: I do not necessarily set out to make metaphors about painting, but as I paint them, I realize that the reason why I am getting engaged by them is because there is a type of vibration between two things, or two objectives. The zombie paintings were about being undead, or dead and alive. It was about being in a state of permanent decay. And that is what paintings are. They have a permanent limbo existence. They have an elevation. They are the dead. They are the undead. They were never alive. They are in a state of limbo.
AFH: Are they? They seem to be in an accelerated state of decay?
EK: The representation on the website is a little heavy on women. It comes across as very misogynist and sadistic, but when I was making them I was thinking that zombies are not necessarily a person who had been butchered. They are just falling apart. Stuff is coming out and gunk is oozing out. They look pretty hideous.
AFH: Are these paintings like your portraits of Dorian Grey? Are they representative for you of painting because they allow you to address the issue of whether painting is immortal, or does it age, and become dated, over time? Is Wilde an influence?
EK: Always, but I won't say that necessarily here. Maybe that makes them more boring than they really are. I wanted to do a series of zombies largely because I had done so many historical characters in past series and I wanted to do a few aping different historical techniques.
AFH: Were you aiming for the images to look contemporary to their references?
EK: People would always say "oh, they are a bit creepy." And that was the best thing anyone could say. I wanted them to be a bit creepy. You know in the background of Scoopy Doo, when they are all running from something and then in the background there is a painting that is all "oogy-boogy." To me, that is the best painting that you can make. I adore those paintings. You know immediately what I mean when I say that.
AFH: Do people usually get that allusion from looking at your work?
EK: I went to the Royal Academy and the sort of art I was always into was the old stuff. At lot of people found it spooky and creepy. Those manky old paintings, instead of something a bit hip and up to date, was more their style. But I love that whole Uncle Whomever style. I love the ancestry and all that. I love that those paintings capture all the history, objectivity, personal stories and humor of painting. I like that.
AFH: Humor is obviously central to your work. Are you happy making art that makes people laugh?
EK: That is a key personality trait to the paintings, yes.
AFH: Understanding how hard it is to categorize humor without killing it, do you think of your work more as satire or as straight comedy?
EK: I want it to be a lot more subtle than that. I want to create things where viewers might not even know that they are funny, but then again, I find most painting funny anyway. When I was making much drier paintings of still-lives and such, then I was finding them funny in a hoaky way. They were amusing to me, but I don't think most people found them funny.
AFH: They just thought they were earnest kitsch?
EK: Perhaps. Most people just don't have my sense of humor.
'Holy Family', 2008
Oil on canvas, 140 x 110 cms
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine. She is Art Editor of Alef (alefmag.com/) and contributes regularly to such publications as Style.com, Grazia, Tank, Sleek and Harper's Bazaar.
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