Nila Walton Ford, the resurrection of the naturalist
by Rafael Cabrices
Osío
When Brooklyn Museum opened in 2006, a sample of the work of ten years of the American painter Walton Ford (White Plains, New York, 1960) gave his best wall to one of his most impressive, Nila (2000). Ford drew on it an Asian elephant with an erection long sinuous, marching with crazed eyes while flying and pecking birds of different species. Some are trampled by the monster, others try to save him. A pair of woodpeckers bore their flanks, a vulture waiting time to open the legs, an owl rests thoughtfully on his neck. The elephant carries the broken tip of a spear wound to the trunk and tusks has halved. He is a rebel from watery eyes, beset by parasites colorful. A few notes in cursive handwriting, nineteenth century, identified some of the birds constellate around him, along with a sketch of a large mammal that can only be seen nearby.
The work is the size of a real elephant, 365.8 by 548.6 centimeters, and is divided into twenty-two rectangular panels, all different size and proportions that are stuck side by side. This construction has, of course, the fable of the blind men and the elephant and his tale about how little can be consensual reality. But the strangest thing is that Nila, like almost all the paintings of this artist, is a watercolor on paper. Ford practiced the same techniques of artists naturalists of the Enlightenment, European expeditions that accompanied each new conquered territory to produce knowledge which then produce ivory, charcoal, diamond or sugar cane. As those pioneers of painting au plein air which swept his brush in forests full of malaria or wetlands frequented by carnivores -Especially the ornithologist John Audubon, whose style is the most quoted by the remote-inherit him, Ford uses the pen, a meticulous drawing with pen and then subsequent layers of color with watercolors, all with the stylized realism of the eighteenth century that of before the picture. Their representation is anatomically incontestable. But, unlike the explorers thus documenting the nature, Ford does not work to keep track of a newborn is classified biodiversity or landscape painting to the specimen or bleeding. He collects both ideas and images in a forest of readings that cover the floor of his studio.
Taschen published a book large format brings together the work of Ford from 1991 to 2008, Pancha Tantra, personally cured by Benedikt Taschen. Nila and there are many other large pieces, such as Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros (2008), showing the last moments of a rhinoceros that sinks in chains on board a ship, and watercolors, smaller, and the strange Cuban number of macaws leaving broken bottles, with titles such as The History will absolve me. Abundant violence and death: a relentless Darwinian competition in which young often end up with the greats. No need, however, irony, and in NGO wallahs (something like the messengers of the NGO), in which a Maribú Indian bald head looks at four brilliant European birds sharing a bag of Hershey's chocolate. An appendix reproduces the texts engendered certain pieces, among them the story of a runaway leopard zoo wandered for ten months in the Swiss Alps until the shot a peasant or passage of a biography of Captain Richard Francis Burton described his court of apes in the Punjab, the subject of the magnificent scene of chaos that covers the tops of the edition, The Sensorium (2003).
Ford distills the legacy of the golden age of colonialism that serves iconography to develop a commentary on globalization, in a way that makes it distinctive and original miraculously in the vast diversity of contemporary art. In addition, it achieves the not inconsiderable feat of being political without being bum, of causing inadequacies without losing the authenticity. Naturally, the possibilities are very broad interpretation of a painting so disturbing and so generous in symbols, allegories to contained forward your eloquence, waving vague meanings to the viewer without ever engaging in explicit enunciation. In the essay that opens Pancha Tantra, Bill Buford noted that all the birds that peck at the elephant habitat Nila are outside the South Asian the elephant, except one, a green parrot that undergoes a shrike on the tip of the penis of the elephant. Buford says the painting is a version of George Orwell's testimony when he had to mow down an elephant, a young man in Burma, and the birds represent that the British imperial story. But one can think of many references in Edward Said's Orientalism or the accounts of Pankaj Mishra or Paul Theroux on the Western fascination with the swamis of Varanasi. Buford himself admits he can not believe that there is another living painter "with so much to tell." In fact, each of its images can release several possible histories. But after going through the different layers of reading and Walton Ford builds excitement in his watercolors, what is vibrating in people approaching your work is something more than evidence of his talent: the despair that gives us the encounter with a monkey that looks too much like us, but that is caged and wounded, looking as if it has a great truth that we are unable to understand. ~
The chronicle of the event represented by Walton admirably summarized in these few lines:
"May 22 1515, Indian rhinoceros, from the Far East landed in the port of Lisbon, after a voyage of 120 days. It was a gift from the Sultan Muzafar II, ruler of Cambay (Gujarat today) to Alfonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, who in turn decided to give it to King Manuel I of Portugal. It was the first time a European ground rhinoceros stepped over a thousand years, and the arrival of the animal caused a sensation. . (...) Pleased with your pet, the king decided, in turn, give it to Pope Leo X "(...) The rhino, it was shipped in December 1515 along with other exotic gifts to Rome. During the trip, King Francis I of France was able to admire the animal on its way to Marseille. However, when passing off the coast of Liguria, in Italy, a storm wrecked the ship and chained, the unfortunate beast could not swim and drowned. His body was recovered off the coast and leather sent to Lisbon, where he was stuffed (...) "
One of the most popular paintings by attending the opening of the exhibition has been titled 'Baba.BG' , which represents how a bird attempting to feed their young after having caught a fish which in turn trying to protect their own children.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.
Walton Ford was born in 1960 in the United States, and from an early age became interested in natural history exhibits in New York, I used to attend regularly, as already explained at the press conference prior to the inauguration of exposure. (An exhibition held in Berlin, called "Beasts.")
Ford, who said "excited" by presenting this collection for the first time in Europe, explained that his paintings do not purport "cruelty", but to show "how human beings can imagine the nature," beyond the teaching of the naturalists.
In total, four are the months in which this exhibition, which mixes the animal with the human subconscious, you can visit in Berlin, and after travel undertaken to address the Austrian capital, Vienna.
0 comments:
Post a Comment