10.2009 > 11.2009
His art exists in a sleeping world in which eroticism fuses with historical memory and beauty that can be found through obsessive desire. Does the making of art bring catharsis and release or does it serve to increase the agony? Perhaps a little bit of both. Because real art is more than merely therapeutic for its maker, for it needs to convey to others essential and universal truths which can bring us enlightenment as the artist invites us to share in his predicament. For this artist there is the possibility of also understanding the comedy of the human condition, even within situations of displacement, whether through the vagaries of history, that with variations are a constant in our world, or through more personal situations, agonised martyrdoms or slings and arrows.
Andrew Mania expresses in his own personal way some very private moments with which we can all nonetheless identify.
Sir Norman Rosenthal
His small portraits on wood have frequently been compared to traditional religious icons. Seemingly a provocation. There is a gulf between glamour and mysticism and the work of Andrew Mania (Bristol, 1974) winks at the iconic reflection of an erotic, hedonistic and narcissistic world. But there is an essential truth to be found in his ambitious connections.
Themes of iconic superficiality, relics and thoughtful gazes seem, in some senses, to haunt the artist. In this, his first solo show in Italy he merely marks out the pitch; starting with the title The Unholy Innocents, he evokes the innocence of the peeping gaze and the yearning for beauty found in the unresolved dialogue between sin and sainthood, longing and detachment. Andrew’s non-saintly innocents are listless boys with fashionably styled hair, barely smiling or melancholic, and are placed in that grey zone between presence and absence, identity and anonymity, sentimental generalisation and the way things really are.
The pictures are descriptive with a hint of pop, shaded with realistic care; yet they don’t really identify – we are given anonymous faces without histories, leaping from neutral or flowery backgrounds. Some set in modestly-sized wall installations, the paintings integrate reused and antique materials, catching passing gazes like ambiguous devotional objects.
There are the same anomalous juxtapositions in the black and white photos – portraits of young effeminate boys living in an isolated, transient and mute world. It is this illustrated immediacy and undefined whole which reinforces the controversial connection with iconography, as examples of the meeting point between representation and abstraction.
And fetishism too. They may well be unrusting images of family memories or any kind of secreted-away object, his fetishism for the quotidian acts as source material for a story-telling that is both intimate and universal. Once in Palermo, the artist foraged out mirrors, fabrics, necklaces, brick-a-brack and bits of leather in markets and second-hand shops. It was then all put together with simple drawing stitches, giving life to altars or curtains in which the putting together of the profane and the veneration for the relic-object, seems to come about through need. A taste for minimalism and a love for accumulation, refined details and humble tone, sensuality and coldness find points of equilibrium.
A little dandy, a little gay, Andrew Mania’s combinatory aesthetic consecrates the use of mirrors in his Palermitan project: used repeatedly as ready made element or as a structural component in a impoverished and fragile architecture, hybridised with photos and embroidery or transformed as ‘drawing paper’, mirrors are given manifold roles. They widen the field of the image, trip the observer into the space of the portraits and multiply reality, offering both points of access and interruptions to the eye.
Your reflection, watching it, becoming multiplied and finally coming to self recognition. Ultimately, to find your own image among images, just like the innocent and non-sacred icons.
Helga Marsala (published in www.exibart.com on 17/11/2008)
