Mitch Cairns
Waylaid S T O O P
The Commercial
11th March - 9th April, 2020
We have come to expect back lighting to draw the eye, whether it be I-phone, laptop, or screen of any dimension. We cannot now imagine power which is not powered and yet,
Mitch Cairns’ pictures glow. They radiate with light and life, and there is no cord in site.
How so?
Twentieth century art leapt out of the blocks, propelled from what came before it and what came with it. Picasso and Braque articulated a new way of seeing and representing the world.
That work was brought to a halt by the first world war, and the world has been shrinking from Cubism’s propositions ever since. The Cubist manifesto has been reduced to a ‘Cubist style’, in order to diminish its promise.
Despite some minor mid-twentieth century efforts to re-invigorate a cubist way of seeing, we have collectively backed away from its scope. It was too challenging and there was no way it could be appropriated for other purposes. We couldn’t find a way forward and so the world reverted to earlier ways of seeing.
Cubism, through this writer’s understanding, allows the artist to make a picture employing different views. The pictures can draw from one angle of a subject, or from many. They can draw from the lessons of history. They can employ ways of seeing induced by the sight and sound of machinery. They can take from African and New Guinea art and from Eastern and Aboriginal art. They can mine Freud.
From the explosion that was brought about by the birth of the twentieth century, Cubism provided the synthesis of the broken parts.
Cubism was a postcard from 1907 and, despite the pace of change since, mail is slow.
The new Cairns work, (just as earlier work does), provides the next chapter in ‘Cubism Revised’. Cubism employs an analytical approach, but a genuine synthesis can only be brokered intuitively.
Cairns here, strikes gold,
Hence the glow.