By Antonio La Cava
When Kafka wrote his works in his XIX-century Vienna he would have never thought that one day an event of his life could have been “painted” by a computer, narrated through various prints and exhibited in a gallery. This has happened at the Eagle Gallery where Paul Coldwell – whom GIORGIOSTUDIO already interviewed for the exhibition Morandi’s legacy: Influences on British Art at the Estorick Collection, of which he was the curator – exhibited Kafka’s Doll and other of his works.
In fact Kafka’s Doll is a collaborative work between Coldwell and the poet and writer Anthony Rudolf, collaboration that gave birth to a bookwork with the images by Coldwell, with a text by Rudolf. The short story by Rudolf is based on a recorded event in Franz Kafka’s life. The writer, after encountering in a park a weeping child who had lost her doll, started writing to her some letters; by pretending to be her doll, he explained the child the reason of “her” departure.
The computerised images by Coldwell trace the story through photography and layering drawn elements. These elements are simple objects, which recall children’s drawings, which joined dot to dot refer to maps of constellations.
Such a scheme – photography and layers – is a metaphor of the relationship between imagination and reality, the children’s world and that of adults.
All in all the work develops themes of loss, displacement and journey already developed in other works. Themes of journey and loss are expressed through a vocabulary of common objects and the prints range from direct inkjets to those which exploit the digital in order to revisit traditional print processes such as lithography and intaglio.
The exhibition, together with the works of the series Kafka’s Doll, features a new suite of screen prints, Sites of Memory, and a series of small unique bronze sculptures that develop the concerns and the language of the bookwork. The sculptures focus on familiar domestic objects such as an iron, coffee pot, bed, coat hanger, to suggest how they may function as repositories for ideas and memory.
The familiar objects are inspired by the art of Giorgio Morandi, whom has had a strong influence on British artists. He never visited Britain and yet the popularity of his work has grown steadily here since the 1950s when his intimate still life paintings were first seen in this country. Coldwell, like Morandi, depicts the everyday-life objects in anthropomorphic terms, and his compositions look like “portraits” with a sense of ambiguity among the objects.
In Coldwell the peculiarity is that his objects – sculptures and prints – are often the basis for digitally developed prints.
“Everyday elements and objects – Coldwell says – are used to construct visual metaphors of experience. This strategy brings the validity of picturing itself into conflict. The role of the computer is a key element in my practice-based research, in particular exploring the fluid relationship between drawing and photography that the digital makes possible, and the changing relationship towards surfaces that I believe the computer engenders”.
The suite of images for Kafka’s Doll has been made within FADE – Fine Art Digital Environment – a joint research project between Camberwell College of Arts and Chelsea College of Art & Design, and is a contribution to the International Centre for Fine Art Research, University of the Arts London.
For further information:
Paul Coldwell: www.camberwell.arts.ac.uk/24539.htm
Eagle Gallery: www.emmahilleagle.com
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