348 FAMOUS LAST WORDS by GLEN BAXTER

FLOWERS GALLERY, CORK ST until May 16 2015

2010 Ink and crayon on paper

80 x 60 cm / 31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in


Anyone who isn't confused, doesn't understand the situation (Ed Murrow, 1969)
 

The visual style of Glen Baxter’s drawings plunges the viewer straight into the world of such comic adventure series as Biggles and Dan Dare.  Working with ink and crayon on paper, he creates a mysterious world in which Vikings ponder a mysterious substance called tofu; and a Sheriff, aided by his doughty horse, is rounding up as many of Giocometti's stretched, elongated statues as he can lay ropes on. Meanwhile a cowboy passionate about Rothkos is too abstracted to notice Old Blaze munching his way through some small Braque paintings.

Below it's the Dutch artist Mondrian who is in the spotlight.  What's so special about that hat? Who is Mondrian anyway? Couldn't anyone find a white ground and then paint a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and fill in three primary colours?  Flat planes  and simple lines? A child could do it in her colouring book...

Baxter's  'Boy’s Own' work questions the social structures underpinning aesthetic values.  He lays bare our pretensions and our esoteric  language, our silences and discomfort, when we lose the capacity to relate with integrity to art. . One critic, said of Giocometti's figures that are reduced as it were to their very core, they"evoke lone trees in winter that have lost their foliage". I doubt if Sheriff John Stone had that in mind as he aimed his lasso.

According to Michael Wilson (Artforum, October 2005), Baxter “...achieves a kind of social-surrealist comedy comparable to the achievements of Monty Python’s Flying Circus".

High praise indeed.

www.glenbaxter.com/
www.flowersgallery.com/ 

www.flowersgallery.com/artists/glen-baxter/  
mymagicalattic.blogspot.com/2014/01/alberto-giocometti-s-studio.html
 www.fondation-giacometti.fr/en/art/16/discover-the-artwork/ 
www.piet-mondrian.org/

And the last word goes to Threeves: