FUSELAGE, 2020
SOLD
FUSELAGE, 2020
3000 x 1240 mm
Oil, 3D modelling and and Digital Collage on C-type print, facemount glossy plexi / alu-dibond 2+5 mm.
“Fuselage” is a homage to every artist that has influenced the identity of artist duo, AD-Reflex, over the course of their career.
Paying tribute is a very personal act and often wrapped up in the identity of the one making the offer. These diverse influences range from the digitally engendered world of Ed Atkins, to painting giants Caravaggio, Jenny Saville, Nicola Samori, Lucian Freud and Adrian Ghenie. Each figure on “Fuselage” represents in some way (directly or indirectly) these six artists. For AD-Reflex, the defining of one’s artistic identity through the work of another is an integral part of the development of any artist. It is a known fact that the work of Jenny Saville is (amongst others) influenced by Lucian Freud, Nicola Samori by Caravaggio (and other Baroque masters), and Adrian Ghenie by Francis Bacon.
The term ‘fuselage’ refers to the central body of an airplane. In the work by AD-Reflex the fuselage setting metaphorically becomes the ‘core body’ of their collective identity; a type of rolling ‘theatre’ in which ‘play’ and an experimental approach to centuries of Western Art coexist and converse with contemporary debates. Yet, their concrete disruptions, unexpected juxtapositions and subversions are resolutely grounded in the here and now.
Historically, the concepts of ‘originality’ and of ‘authorship’ are central to the debate of ‘appropriation’ in contemporary art (and especially during the 1980s with Post-modern appropriation artists like Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince). However, “Fuselage” echoes the writing of philosopher Roger Scruton, where he states that “the most original works of art may be a genial application of a well known vocabulary. What makes them original is not their defiance of a past or rude assaults on settled expectations, but the elements of surprise with which they invest the forms and repertoire of a tradition. Without tradition, originality cannot exist for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable.”
AD-Reflex celebrate the mimetic qualities of ‘paint’ as a medium (both in its traditional form and through digital painting), together with process-led abstraction. Through the experimental nature of their processes and the use of the oil medium with various binding mediums, their work borders on the ‘alchemical’. Painting clashes with technology in the form of 3D-modelling, digital collage, and digital photo manipulation techniques (C-type print, face-mounted on glossi plexiglass / aluminium-dibond), to form a distinctly new visual language. Ultimately, the work of AD-Reflex is about ‘visual trickery’, where no clear distinction can be drawn between the painterly and the digital.