Just another postcard from Wayne

American Pop montage genius, James Rosenquist, believed in the notion of irritating painting and I believe this translates into “Hypermaximism”, a term I coined to describe work that is excessively detailed and potentially annoying. While visual splendor , ornate obsession or the’ ocular gush’ underwrites my painting, I confess that I have always loved objects and the stories they tell. Postcards are the visual currency we use to illuminate these storiesIn the beginning, my obsession with objects translated into couplings of cadillacs, rednecks and genitalia, but as I evolved, the roaring, vast luxury of European palaces and cathedrals became my ignition switch. Many, however, would argue that American ‘trash ethos’ is the parking spot next to the Baroque where King Louis the Sun God could actually be Liberace. How perfectly did The Versailles recently accommodate kitsch king Jeff Koons?I consider myself as a ‘quilter’ who weaves the spores of the Baroque into contemporary fabric. My interiors don’t actually exist, rather, they are the blurred recapitulation of experiences, and much like ‘Chinese Whispers”, they morph in their re-telling.The visual complexities of the interior paintings were a joy to paint, but by the completion of the “Celestial Ceilings” project, I found that I needed a new frontier which essentially presented itself as a crossroad. In one direction was my fascination with chandeliers which I had started to acknowledge as crystal comets and the other was the intimate engagement of the miniature and the intensity of its voice.As this show is really a summary of appendices, in the form of postcards, I went back to the support images from Paris, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Wurzburg and Rome and chose objects and spaces which could be translated into a personal commentary about some of the issues left unresolved from the Apotheosis series.They have their own codes which are grounded within Art History, so each painting contains an allegorical summary of the space or the circumstances. The sky features as a form of salvation which we endorse either spiritually as
The Ascension or the place we are projected through as we journey to adventure. The stoic statues operate within metaphysical soap-box narratives and the interiors represent pre-electronic home-theatre installations that pay homage to my favourite Baroque ceiling muralists.While they appear to be significantly reductive in comparison to my usual overload, they represent an opportunity to exorcise some demons that have been haunting me since I encountered the Flemish virtuosos in the Louvre some 12 years ago. The diminutive scale made them unbelievably engaging, so these are a few of my favourite things.Dr. Wayne Brookes
2009