Crash-Stop: Games within games - the role of the macabre and the surreal in art.

This is an artists talk that I gave recently to coincide with the group exhibition ' A painted otherworld ' held at the Dunamaise Gallery in Portlaois, Co.Laois curated by Rebecca Deegan ( you can find her work here https://rebeccadeegan.com/ - and more information on the exhibition here http://www.dunamaise.ie/exhibitions/previous-exhibitions/275-a-painted-otherworld.html

Games within games - the role of the macabre and the surreal in art


This is a skull.

This is a skull but in real life it is a child's toy designed for educational purposes , a collectible part work magazine which built week after week into a complete skeleton. Any object taken out of context becomes mysterious and open to meaning.


Pyramid of skulls - Paul Cezanne c 1900

This is a painting of skulls by Paul Cezanne, cue unease at viewing painting – common responses being – isn't that creepy, are you obsessed by death, I wouldn't hang that on my wall etc etc.

These are real skulls from the killing fields in Cambodia .

None and all of these things are real – art relies on this paradox to function. The role of the artist is to engage you in such a way as to draw you in and suspend your disbelief – to communicate the reality of the idea separate to the artifice of the medium by assigning contrary values to the framework you already hold.

Art has always dealt with the macabre or the surreal , either for religious reasons – to warn of the existence of hell and damnation, especially in times of famine and war such as this painting ' The triumph of death' from 1562 by Peter Bruegel the elder.

Or the disturbing sensuality and eroticism of this image by Franz Von Stuck 'The sin' :

On the surface, it's a reference to the story of Eve and the snake in the garden of Eden , but below that surface hints at possession, wisdom, desire and knowingness and lack of shame in opposition to how the story of Genesis is traditionally read.

Saturn devouring his children - Peter Paul Rubens .

As an artist I have always been drawn to darker subject matters . I first came across this painting by Rubens on a student study trip to Madrid sometime in 1989, hung over and drifting around the Prado , it became an internal symbol of my relationship with my father at the time , (and later the image of the child worked its way into some of my later box paintings via the baby but I had also watched my own daughter playing with her own toy baby born , (so my usage is both quote and in-quote) we put so much energy and personification into our childhood toys that they take on a life of their own ).

Falling Apart ver5 - 2009

Rubens painting also influenced Goya's work on the same theme. What is so compelling about these paintings ? What draws us as artists to the macabre? Part of my answer to this question is psychology , art allows us to draw out our darkest fears or desires and through empathy we can involve the viewer in that conversation – Saturn fears his power being usurped by his children therefore he must destroy them , if the father of modern psychology, Freud is to be believed, as children we compete with our fathers for the affection of our mothers.


Saturn devouring one of his children - Goya

This is one of the so called black paintings (1819-1823) that Goya created towards the end of his life, some attribute the darkness of these to him ingesting the lead from his paint via chewing his paintbrushes , they were never really meant for public consumption but became known later , previous to this from 1810 to 1820 he had secretly created a series of prints entitled ‘ the disasters of war a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, and the subsequent Peninsular War of 1808–14 of which this is a good example:

The disasters of war no.37 ‘A heroic feat! With dead men!’ - Goya (1812-15)

Which was later riffed on by Jake and Dinos Chapman


Jake and Dinos Chapman – (After Goya) An heroic feat with dead men (1993)

Meaning is dependent on observation, setting and inference, personal circumstances lead to emotional expression of stress within art, the macabre activates a part of our minds that relates to the imagination and dreams , it shifts us out of rational space into the non rational world of nightmares and dreams. It works through a similar mechanism to that of theatre or fiction – the willing suspension of disbelief. In times of stress and war doubly so , as in this painting by Marc Gertler:

Marc Gertler – Merry go round (1916)

based on a roundabout at a fair on Hampstead heath in the winter of 1914-15 ( the fair itself was apparently held on behalf of wounded soldiers) , right at the beginning of the first world war , the figures on the roundabout are almost grotesque , trapped – the ultimate fairground ride gone wrong, a fair held for wounded soldiers who upon recovery might very well have to return to the front , from one merry go round to another.

The circus and the carnival have a long history of representation in art, often in relation to horror or the macabre think of Stephen Kings story It and its character Penny wise the clown :

Pennywise the clown.

Or this assemblage by the artist Kris Kuski:

'The deadly sins' - Kris Kuski.

Which refers back to Bruegel and Bosch’s carnival paintings , especially the fight between carnival and lent –

Peter Bruegel - the fight between carnival and lent.

But Kuskis' work also refers to the practice of decorating ossaries and reliquaries such as the monumental ossuary of the former Sedlec abbey in the Czech republic which is estimated to contain the bones of between 40 to 70 thousand people arranged artistically in a small chapel .

Sedlac Ossuary

View of the chandelier - Sedlac Ossuary.

Clowns themselves evoking feelings of terror and horror in many people, and from the clown we find the mask :

James Ensor .

In masks we find a face as unknowable as those we find in crowds. As our cities and our lives become ever more crowded we lose ourselves amongst strangers , walking down a street becomes an exercise in surrealism – surrealism being a way of looking at reality which relies on the irrational part of our mind which holds the imagination , the emotions , dreams, desires, fears and nightmares.

Heath Ledger as The Joker.

The macabre and the surreal allow us to look into reality and expose it , to question it in ways not possible using traditional representation or abstraction . In paintings such as Paul Delvaux s the village of the sirens – Delvauxs work is at first seen as realism but on closer inspection becomes dreamlike and threatening – what is this village – will these women call us to our deaths as the sirens did in ancient mythology ?

The Village of sirens - Paul Delvaux 1942

Or this painting by Dorothea Tanning ‘ Birthday’ where do the doors lead too , why is she dressed with seaweed, what is that strange creature on the floor.


Dorothea Tanning - Birthday 1942.

But what is a painting ? (the treachery of objects)


Magritte - ' This is not a pipe ( the treachery of objects)'

Primarily a painting is an object , a thing of canvas or wood or plaster . In traditional art the things it depicts are of an outer verifiable reality ( still life, life drawing, portraiture ) or a record of an event or moment , history painting . Most people when asked about painting still think of painting as that . Photography effectively killed off this kind of painting from the 1860s and onward ( see the work of early photographer Jean Louis Marie Eugenie Durieu with Delacroix and compare the photographs produced in relation to Delacroix’s paintings – also read Arron Scharfs book on photography and art) and painters like the impressionists moved to record the humdrum and everyday lives of the middle and working classes, prostitutes, and the life of cities in a more immediate and less academic style.


Edouard Manet - A Bar at the Folies-Bergere 1882

What is interesting about this painting is that it exists within mirrors , the bar maid looks out at us, as we look back at her and behind into the mirrors where we see her rear reflection, and realise she is not looking out at us she is in fact talking to someone at the bar , we are detached from both her and the crowd , the meaning bounces around like a mirror, its a sleight of hand which pulls away our expectations, a game within a game.

later on the cubists started to unhitch painting from the need for representation or realism completely as in 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' by Picasso:

By Pablo Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, New York, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=547064

( as Impressionism fundamentally is realism rather than abstraction ) and this is the point at which painting becomes more insular and more exclusive – the public love impressionism but loath cubism , without an audience what is the point of painting at all ? For painting to have an audience it must communicate in a language that people understand . We no longer have to paint realistically but we must paint in an understandable way.

The argument( how I became a horse)

And this is pretty much the argument I was having with myself in 2007 when I became first a horse and then later a doll or an angel.

Painting of a brass horse ( self portrait)

Brass horse.

To get peoples attention and draw them in I realised I had to first give them something recognizable , for me the solution to the problem came via still life, after years of not drawing at all and making paintings like these:

Glosalallia - 2000-2003

Flag no.3 2000-2003

I’d begun to hunt through charity shops for objects to draw, brass seemed a challenge technically because its shiny and reflects, but I also noticed that the objects I was drawn to seemed to have a secret life , they said something to me which lead back to my study of tarot cards at college , I had always been drawn to the card the Knight of wands and its meaning .

Knight of wands from the Rider Waite tarot.

After leaving college I had also made a series of paintings I called 'The magician announces a murder' which served as a sort of prototype grammar for the later paintings – an image called the magician ( as in those days this was my card ) went through a series of geometrical transformations which mirrored what was happening in my life at the time .

The Magician announces a murder - 1993/4 ?

In another charity shop I found a brass chalice which led to this painting:


Everywhere nowhere and now - 2008


The chalice in the previous painting refers to the Ace of cups - From the Rider Waite tarot.

So the objects I was using starting to take on meaning to me personally the horse being myself and the ace of cups well , I’m a recovering alcoholic my father was an alcoholic and a cup can be both curse and hope .

Technically my work was still crude , but I had that year rediscovered De Chirico and as I did the reading and looking I should have been doing at college and started drawing more I began to see that De Chirico was also technically crude but his work still held great power .

De Chirico - Piazza


De Chirico - Mystery and melancholy of a street

De Chirico - The enigma of the hour.

De Chirico’s work is unsettling because at first what they depict seems familiar but then becomes increasingly strange, the more you examine them the more you realise that perspective is being played with – terraces recede impossibly into the distance , the time of day is indeterminate , menacing shadows come away from statues as if they have a life of their own , the time of day seems to be stuck at either sun up or sun down. The cityscapes are of city's which have never existed , they remind us of something but they are city's in appearance only .

Up until now Id been thinking of my work in a traditional still life way , to prove to myself I could still draw, working with available light and constantly having to redraw at the beginning of each session to reflect the change in shadow and position – I was still working full time so had to either paint at night or during weekends – as a convenience I started to use a lamp to ensure the lighting wouldn’t alter between sessions which led me to realise the importance and uses of shadow but it also led me to realise how similar this still life set up was to a stage set ( I was using an old wine box to put the objects into and paint from , kind of a reference for measured drawing .

And I remembered a painting I’d made in the nineties called ship of fools.

Ship of fools - 1997 ?

At the time I was living with someone who had children and watching them play with their toys and the negotiations they made within the games they played as to what role each toy would play in the scenario they had thought up showed me how painting could be a negotiation for meaning between the objects in a still life and my own inner life .

So the ship is both ship and toy and painting of a ship or a toy .

One of the children held a burial service for one of her barbies in a bog drain at the edge of the farm we were living on at the time , I Went back later and rescued the barbie and started a series of paintings called Barbie Mutation catastrophe , based on discarded toys and the outlines they leave .

Barbie Mutation catastrophe - 1995/6 ?

You must find the demon in everything

But back to De Chirico – watching the way the children played with their toys gave me an idea for the way my stage plays could play out , with constant lighting and a search for objects these objects could take on meaning in relation to each other and shadows ,

From ZEUXIS THE EXPLORER

“The world is full of demons,” said Heraclitus of Ephesus, strolling in the shade of the porticos, in the hour pregnant with high noon’s mystery, while in the dry embrace of the Asiatic gulf, the salty water was simmering beneath the south-western wind.

You must find the demon in every thing.

The ancient Cretans printed an enormous eye in the middle of the skinny profiles that chased each other around their vases, their domestic tools, the walls of their houses.

Even the fetus of a man, of a fish, of a chicken, of a serpent is, in its first stage, entirely an eye.

You must find the eye in every thing.


Still from 'Battleship Potemkin'

This still and scene from the Battleship Potemkin shows the ability of images to shock, the horror of the scene is played out through the ruined eye ( the charachter is a nanny looking after a baby ) , later referenced in the surrealist film Un chien andalou ( an andalusian dog)– from the early twentieth century cinema and the fine arts have cross fertilized each other constantly

We can see the influence of these films in the paintings of Francis Bacon:

Francis Bacon - study of Pope Innocent

And perhaps the work of the lesser known Gregory Gillespie


Gregory Gillespie - Untitled ( ?)

And in the 1943 film ‘ The picture of Dorian grey' Ivan allbright and his brother created the paintings that reflected the gradual disintegration of Dorian Greys’ soul

Ivan Allbright - The picture of Dorian Grey ( 1943)

The unreality of existence

From De chirico comes surrealism , surrealism itself coming from dada – an art of the absurd which can be seen as a reaction against the horrors of the first world war and the turbulence of an increasingly mechanised and alienating society , along with surrealism and dada, film, and specifically german expressionism, have been one of the biggest influence on my and others work .

In ‘The cabinet of Dr Caligari’ the director Robert Wiene constructs a narrative which references cubism, absurdity and the macabre . He does not try to represent reality, rather he constructs a reality which twists and distorts like a bad mirror. The sort of reality we would find in a dream or in the original Brothers grimm fairytales , where the forest is always dark and menacing and witches are burnt alive in ovens by children.

Still from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

The story of Dr Caligari is one of the ultimate surrealist/horror stories – a fair comes to town bringing with it a sideshow somnabulist act , the somnabulist can forsee the future – and those who ask questions about their future end up dead , it is a film within a film as it is seemingly told in flashback but eventually you discover that the villain of the film is in fact the director of a mental asylum and the hero is insane and recounting the tale of his fevered imaginings. But what really attracted me was the way in which reality has been invented through the use of painted stage sets and distorted perspective – in the same way that De Chirico distorts the city , Wiene distorts the idea of realism and narrative .

Which led me to construct more elaborate stage sets for my own paintings such as these .

Ghost town - ( 2009)

That we should startle the empty streets ( 2011)

The demon in the object is the thing which attracts me , I cannot paint a thing which has no spirit or resonance which does not speak of secrets and hidden depths .

Dr caligari -everything becomes disconcerting ,

painting becomes an inquiry into the nature of reality because reality itself is full of absurdity, the macabre and the surreal, and once looked at closely it begins to break down. What painting allows us to do is compress that absurdity down into the awkward and unreal space of the canvas to construct a truer reality ,

such as in the work of Max Beckmann

Max Beckmann - The night

Which seems to be a drawing back of the curtain into a hidden room in which dark things happen – the night that we fear and the threat of fairytales to not enter the forest at night, to not go down that dark alley – but that dark alley is as much in the mind and the imagination – the fear of what we might be capable of , what irrationality might draw us into , which is perhaps why these works and the macabre make us react in the way that we do.

Or the softer but yet more disconcerting painting of Magritte.