Coming past me on Pinterest yesterday morning, some really impressive portrait paintings with abstractionist interventions, along the lines of the one below, the left panel of two:
(#1) Andrew Salgado, The Painter’s Apprentice (2014)
Unlike many of the artists I’ve posted about on this blog, AS and his personal and artistic histories are widely available to the public; there’s a Wikipedia page, tons of stuff on his website, and plenty of open (in fact blunt and unapologetically opinionated) interviews that are both informative and thought-provoking. You don’t have to wonder about his childhood — he talks about growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan with enormous affection — or how his personal life, as, as he puts it, a “young gay white guy” with a longtime male partner, living a new life in working-class London, and so on, plays out in his work — he’s happy to reflect on all the stages he’s been through in ten years, and on being an artist as a business, an enterprise that requires planning and salesmanship.
So: not only are masculinity, sexuality, and social identity recurrent themes in his art, they’re also prominent aspects of his presentation of self: as a guy guy, offhandedly but also defiantly queer (like, don’t fuck with me, dude, or you’ll be sorry), and simultaneously working-class, practically minded, playfully imaginative, and genuinely erudite.
AS came to me as paintings I’d never seen before but was bowled over by, paintings with no context at all. I’ve already given you a lot of context, so I’ll jump right in with more paintings, recent ones (in many ways unlike the early painting in #1, and strikingly unlike this year’s work so far, mixed-media depictions of flowers — floral atlases crossed with Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe). Then to biography and art criticism.
Three recent AS paintings (2020 – 2023). Dreamscapes. A long way from portraits like #1.
(#2) Time (2020): the ages of man; note the baby contemplating the skull
(#3) Lovers in a Dangerous Time (2022); a direct reference to Bruce Cockburn’s 1984 song with this title, explicitly about the Cold War, but given other interpretations by commenters, including reference to HIV/AIDS; for this painting, the reference is to the Covid pandemic; other possible allusions in the title are to Love in the Time of Cholera (the 1985 novel by Gabriel Garcia Márquez) and Love in the Time of AIDS (the 2010 book by Mark Hunter)
(#4) Rites (2023): the title is probably a reference to rites of passage to manhood; in any case, by now you will have noticed the recurrent visual elements in these paintings (among them: daisies, a bird, the (smiling) moon, pairs of feet)
Information and analysis. Basic stuff from Wikipedia (lightly edited by AMZ):
Andrew Salgado (born 1982) is a Canadian artist who works in London and has exhibited his work around the world. His paintings are large-scale works of portraiture that incorporate elements of abstraction and symbolic meaning.
He received a BFA from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 2005 and graduated with an MFA from Chelsea College of Art & Design in London in 2009.
… He is openly gay. In 2008 he was a victim of homophobic violence, when he and his partner were beaten by eight men during a music festival in British Columbia.
On the Fellow Resident site, there’s an informative and revealing interview with AS by Joseph Perry, published on 8/24/15.
For commentary on his work, we have Salgado’s own notes on his website:
Andrew Salgado’s paintings have evolved greatly in style since the large-scale, painterly portraits he began painting about a decade ago, where large swathes of colour played across the surface to define his subjects. In his most recent work – the representational has given way to the more abstract. Now colourful, symbolic, and compositional elements are the driving force of the painted image, but a complex interweaving of figures remain a common thread.
Today his subjects are depicted in a fantastical, often ominous tableaux, with any combination of patterns, abundance, and excess play upon the painted surface, including harlequin-like figures, the motif of a heavy, low-hanging moon; or other unrecognisable figurative shapes sift in and out of the composition, partially obscured or partially revealed. Where there once was a desire to place the figure at the forefront of the image, now there is a kind of harmonious cacophony that creates a sort of chaotically orchestrated puzzle.
There are abundant references to the tradition of figurative painting both historic and contemporary: Matisse, Gauguin, and Bacon are all readily recalled; while contemporary greats like Tal R, Daniel Richter, and Peter Doig are also referenced with equal reverie and respect – often like quiet in-jokes for a viewer to catch.
Addendum: AS’s photo from his website:
April 28, 2024 at 10:17 am |
Thank you for calling attention to this amazing talent!
April 28, 2024 at 10:28 am |
I resisted the impulse to post a big portfolio of his portraits, which are remarkable; his talent for faces strikes me as comparable to John Singer Sargent’s (though in a vastly different style). But now that you know about him, you can find a ton of these on the net.