Douglas Gordon: ...and his friends

Gordon’s paintings are process rigorous, using a ‘primary school technique’ which also illustrates the explosively intimate relationships between Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and the progeny who are in the ‘dark room’ as it were – with all the connotations that come to mind. The canvases are burned, stained, and set upon with knives, needles, love, and the necessity of keeping everything together – giving the fabric a metaphorical surface. Insisting on using the solvent transfer process, Gordon is appropriating the great appropriator, teasing Rauschenberg’s Inferno series out of the 20th century and into the ‘ancient present’. The dates may have changed but ‘the song remains the same’… the question is - what can modern-day allegory possibly mean? Despite entering an age dominated by visual culture, imagery has become increasingly fleeting and variably observed. There is no rigidity in the icons of the 21st Century as there were within the paintings of the old masters, rather, they float, ill-defined and porous. The ethereal shades of the collage allow for a transient relation between the viewer and the paintings. The audience must sketch in the ties that spin like an amphetamine web – across the canvas, across the room, and beyond.

The zealous way in which Gordon besets his canvases is more alchemist than artist. Taking his knife to the body items he has collected and endlessly duplicated with a scanner, there is something of a mad scientist about him in his Gothic leather apron. His work as divider, reconstituter, makes him both Frankenstein and monster, in a Jeckyl vs Hyde amnesty, as the duality of his mournful and hedonistic practice is realised. Fire returns throughout this body of work: Gordon burns through his studio like a fever.