Paranoid Realism

Hope and fear is a feeling with two sides.

As long as there’s one there’s always the other.
This is the root of our pain. In the world of hope and fear, we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt and we keep looking for alternatives. (1)

Paranoid realism considers the alternative, abstracted, and in some cases disturbed realities inherent in seven contemporary practices.

‘Making strange’ aspects of life experience, or specific moments in time, Krista Berga, Maurice Ortega, Madeleine Rosser, Gemma Smith, Susan Lincoln, Louiseann Zahra and Chris Worfold have subverted the established order of things, to unveil ‘the new’ and ‘the unknown’. Across a range of disciplines including photography, sculptural installation, drawing and painting these artists encourage the viewer to see things with ‘new eyes’ — which is quite a different experience to seeing new things.(2) Most intriguing is their creative and sometimes obsessive subversions of the familiar matter of our everyday lives, not just via formal or contextual manipulation, but through very specific acts of imaginative transformation.(3)

Chris Worfold’s gestural, stream-of-conscious work fashions a world of hybrid creatures out of a series of haphazard paint stains. A tortured collision of rodent-like trolls, menacing exaggerated insects, and extra-terrestrial sub-humans, Don’t Feed the Bear (2002) abducts the viewer and relocates him or her within the trajectories of some possessed mind. The gluttonous drawing transmutes and transfixes. Its alchemy works at the tissues between truth and paranoia. The viewer is compelled to enter the chimera, a portal of thick, dominant strokes and intricate renderings in acrylic and conte crayon.

IT ROTTED IN THE SUN. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. REMEMBER? 2004 and ABOVE ALL THINGS. MEAT, SLEEP (2004), aggressively punchy narratives by Krista Berga, reduce flowery, 18th century British prose to paranoid messages. Loaded with pain, fear, not knowingness and impermanence, these texts are non-saccharine, ambiguous notations imbibed with psycho-sexual brutality. Extending the artist’s fascination with ‘fucking reality’, the work is driven by a relentless desire for things to be different. Full of hope and fear, they are uneasy, unnerving and the voids are as important and vital to the comprehension of the message as the blunt copy.

Berga’s statements about the non-acceptance of what, where and how we are highlight the inevitability of the ultimate human weakness — the cowardly retreat into the distraction of who we are.

A similar kind of ‘white angst’ is evident in Susan Lincoln’s sculptural installation titled There’s no one else in hell (2004). This abstract record, of a deeply personal journey diarises fertility and the idea of time running out. The groupings of ceramic spheres strung in numb clusters of teased, acrylic threads are devoid of life, yet loaded with fecund associations. Are these forms derived from some future utopia - a pristine world? Or do they herald something much more sinister. Laced with un-met expectation and the fear of impossibility the central and surrounding nests of There’s no one else in hell hover bizarre, silent and suggestive.

Like Lincoln’s lingering talismans, Louiseann Zahra’s installation represents the passage of time.

Zahra’s series of Lilliputian terrariums feature delicate flora and plant-life immortalized in silver. Here the organic and ephemeral is cast and catalogued in miniature for posterity – like a reliquary. These poetic, precious micro-worlds housing unfamiliar botanical specimens create an unnerving tension between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the static, the fluid and the contained. Intriguing and obsessive these safety-houses suggest that alternative void somewhere between the mantelpiece and the museum.(4)

Madeleine Rosser’s dramatic aerosol painting after Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s iconic sculpture The Ecstasy of St Teresa di Avila of 1652 captures the Spanish Roman-Catholic mystic and monastic reformer in a spectacular, private union with a seraphim representative of God.

In the mode of spiritual ecstasy a two dimensional Teresa reclines dramatically in complete submission. Her posture is limp and passive her head is thrown back with eyes half-closed and mouth half open. Alongside her figure an angel, bearing a dart of divine love, is poised ready to spear. The image is rich with the symbolism of the Catholic liturgy and the inter-relationship of love, spiritual ecstasy, sacrifice and death.

We witness St Teresa’s complete reception of God and her autobiographical account of spiritual-bodily pain is palpable.

"On the left appeared an angel in bodily form. He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seemed to be all on fire…In his hands I saw a great, golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out he pulled them with it, he left me utterly consumed by the great love of God."(5)

A literal and deliberate homage to the master of the Baroque style, the image is loaded with a tome of art-historical and religious references. It shares with religious icons the function of acting as a stimulus for piety. Rosser’s high art —usually read in the context of inner-city culture-jamming(6) — stabs at the failure of secularism. In Rosser’s work, we are led to believe St Teresa herself, in all her masterful Baroque virtuosity, surveys and rejects 21st century complacency and spiritual disregard.(7)

Maurice Ortega’s Vital object 2004, provides yet another eerie and uneasy enquiry into the meaning of life. Focused on the structure of the vital form, Ortega’s disturbing, alien x-ray avoids comprehension. Vital object challenges the viewer’s ability to make sense of a single, haunting image with no connection to myth, meaning or narrative. All that exists is absence. It may even be interpreted as the “not-so-soft-centre” at the heart of Berga’s chilling messages.

Gemma Smith’s non-objective painting strikes a fresh chord in the ‘paranoid realism’ collection of works. Titled, Three 2004 — the coalescence of odd greens – turquoise, aqua and emerald, geometrically opposed to arrangements of pale pink and red — challenges our expectations of abstract painting. As Josh Milani suggests, Smith’s colour fragments swoop around receding expanses of negative space(8), and the complexity of the angular forms achieved through hours of preparatory drawing, derived from other linear accents and voids(9) result in crystalline shapes which draw the eye across the surface of the canvas. There is a fluidity that is both dynamic and static. Ambiguous forms take on a complexity that invites and refuses pictorial immersion.(10) Through saturated sections of opaque and translucent oil paint, familiar life moments are distilled. Rhythmically playful, the dynamic essence of this odd all-sort transports the viewer far from the dark voids of the material world and out into the cosmos.

Amelia Gundelach
2004