Kim Novak in a panic, Sleeping Beauty weeping helplessly, an army of familiar feminine faces in distraught: such is the ill-fated landscape set up by artist duo McDermott and McGough for their latest show ‘In My Dreams You are Mine’ at Parisian gallery Jerome de Noirmont.
These paintings and screen-prints are based on extracts of American films and cartoons of the 1940s and 1960s, that reflect the growing melodramatic genre of the time. The stills are surrounded by colourful rectangles, evoking both comic strips and Mondrian, for a sense of unrootedness, and a result both tragic and light.
“We don’t care about films or cartoons. We care about the human condition” said the artist about the show. Indeed, the overstaging and exaggeration at play isn’t an aesthetic end in itself but an exploration of the intricacy of tragedy, and witnessing an Other’s pain. Pathos? Sympathy? Identification? The familiarity of the faces and visual language create a conflicting sense of ease and discomfort, for a cathartic result. In a similar contrast, past shows have include contrasting well-known cartoons with dark, tongue in cheek titles such as ‘romance can die like a cigarette’.
The show is completed by boxes of Brillo and Heinz, filled to the brim with what appears to be 1950s cartoons, but upon closer inspection, is in fact trompe l’oeil statue. The nudge at Andy Warhol highlights the deceptiveness of today’s consumer culture.
If those two men made a name for themselves in the Eighties for their top hats (which they still wear today), detachable collars, and converting a New York townhouse into a 19th century home, their refusal to deal with the present is deeply revelatory of the contemporary era.
McDermott and McGough “In Dreams You’re Mine”
Until January 23rd 2013
Galerie Jerome De Noirmont