Skeleton Makes Good

The exhibition ‘Skeleton Makes Good’ is part of a project that operates parallel with recent conceptual text based paintings, offering paintings for sale. Both projects are derived from published newspaper advertisements and aim to replicate the printing process with a hard-edged aesthetic. However, the paintings in ‘Skeleton Makes Good’ occupy a space on the opposite end of the visual spectrum, relying on colour, form and other aesthetic hooks often employed by mass advertising.

‘Skeleton Makes Good’ is a collection of paintings that act as the disembodied soul of commercial advertising, a haunted parody of the built-in obsolescence of consumer culture. The large-scale, satirical deconstructions in the exhibition are a type of anti advertising and consumption through the removal of all text and imagery present in the original advertisements. The intended message is neutralised, sabotaged.

By stripping bare all signifiers from the appropriated advertisements, the paintings in ‘Skeleton Makes Good’ emerge as ghostly and enigmatic post-painterly abstractions. The paintings are exercises in delineated areas of colour that emphasise the flatness of the painting surface, a type of reverse expressionism.

The original colourful advertisements, which the paintings in ‘Skeleton Makes Good’ are based on, often create a sense of celebration and joy – balloons, streamers, fireworks etc. The odd and deadpan paintings in the exhibition aim to subvert this strategy, inventing a deflated, empty environment.

‘Skeleton Makes Good’ is a humorous, deconstructivist approach to the sublime, a mutated aesthetic language that is semi familiar, assembled with a dose of conceptual value and a smile.

- Michael Lindeman