Máté Orr Exhibition

 RESEARCH ON MATE ORR AND HIS EXHIBITION

 I visited Masks, Mysterys and Other Worldly Pleasures, a solo show by Máté Orr at the Fairhurst Gallery on Bedford St. on the 29th of April after having liked the look of a flyer I'd seen in the city. I am always intrigued by interesting ways artists use the natural world to tackle issues relevent to human being, as this is something I find reccurring in my own practice. 

The layout of the show inside was curated in part by Jane Richards Interiors, who installed some furniture within the exhibition. This gave the gallery a setting which broke from the traditional sterile white-walled format. In previous (Foundation) projects I have explored the Stuckist movement and literature, and I found execution of this exhibition brought one particular point from their manifesto to mind;

18. The Stuckist is opposed to the sterility of the white wall gallery system and calls for exhibitions to be held in homes and musty museums, with access to sofas, tables, chairs and cups of tea. The surroundings in which art is experienced (rather than viewed) should not be artificial and vacuous.

 Having furniture in the gallery space, (even though they were not permitted for use) not only gave the space a sense of culture but also vitality, with thick red curtains and lavish tapestries instilling an aura of the sublime. This, coupled with the Fairhurst Gallery's excellent job of opulently framing the dominant pieces really added a sense of the ornate.

Orr's style interested me, combining sections of very high art oil painting, with references to modern culture, and then graphic block colour graphic silhouttes depicting cartoon animal features. A beautiful contrast begins between the simplicity of the silhoutted shapes and the rich tonal detail picked up in exquisite oil work.

I sought to understand his process, and quickly realised Orr had obviously laid down the silhouette shapes first. In The Incident (right), the red shape for the bird was intially the same as the blue reptile head, however Orr had then worked over this with oil to add the additional detail, building up the clothes, bodies and other oil elements over top.

When getting up close to a canvas, I could also see that Orr had been able to get such crisp yet complex shapes by using some form of masking film, or adhesive vinyl create a stencil for the design, before painting overtop as the sky blue of the crocodile from was almost imperceptably raised from the background colour, where the initial vinyl was peeled away and the uneeded surrounding paint layer removed, leaving the remaining blue with a slightly raised lip around it's edge.

I hadn't thought of using machine cut vinyl to recreate accurate shapes on a canvas. It is an interesting technique idea which could prove useful for me in future projects, as crispness and accuracy of form is something I often find myself persuing. I also really enjoyed the mental detective process of trying to retrace the artist's steps and unlock the method they used to get their effect. I think Orr must have a very well formed knowlege of materials to be able to combine new and old media so masterfully to achieve such a unique effect.

Another thing I found interesting in Orr's work was his work combining new and old symbolism. In Macabre Mirror (right) a sheep skull is shown reflected in the shiny casing of a catering whipped cream dispenser. These are infamous for a more hedonistic persuit however, as they are used to crack nitrous oxide canisters into balloons to be inhaled for it's psycoactive effects. The prescence of such a modern symbol in a fine art painting context such as this really took me by surprise, and gave the piece a certain black humour. Mirrors and reflections are typically used in oil paintings of this style to critique self interest and vanity. Here the traditional mirror has been replaced with the dispenser, and the message becomes tongue in cheek. The title 'Macabre Mirror' and the isolation of composition could suggest that the practice of NOS could be something Orr himself finds macabre and brutish, or conversely that it is the illicit activities we take part in that we find great reflections of ourselves.