kate lyddon - works

Exhibitions

IF YOU WANT TO DANCE, DANCE, STUDIO 1.1, LONDON, 2009

On immediate impact (somehow the boxing/car crash metaphor seems utterly
apt), Kate Lyddon's paintings depict a world of abandon and excess. In these
acute quasi-narratives (nonetheless Grand for all that) scraps of paper and
real hair trail across the canvas like discarded clothes. There is something
deliberately seedy here but any element of Bacon is much much younger and
lighter (more legible? a less bleary eye?) and the desolation is soaked in
snakebites not champagne. A lurid saga of teenage disappointment rather than
hard-won despair.

In fact her work can be read as bringing together two unlikely (if
hardly impossible) bedfellows, though the comparisons soon fall apart: the
particular sado/maso defensive strategies of Bacon's raw emotion and
Hockney's sardonic glibness didn't seem open to a woman artist back then,
and hardly are nowadays, (hardly necessary, we could say - who needs that
much posturing now?)

Bacon is off the hook then - indeed off the peg. And instead of
masochism there is a gimlet eye that skewers like Van Dongen or Ffeiffer,
and what looks like a confessional Hello! from-the-gutter element in her
work is actually sharp-eyed observation. Scaled up, in the larger works the
characters take on a hieratic quality but are still like us: allegorical
figures from a Biblical or even Hindu epic - petty Gods obsessed by their
own melodramas. Pop Idol reality TV Ramayana.

In a strange way she seems hardly a painter at all, so strongly does she
come across as a chronicler or satirist of the Youtube demi-monde. But seen
in strict painterly terms she is closest to an amazing amalgam of early and
very late Matisse, where the decoupage vies with the paint in its bravado,
elegance and simplicity. Deliberately countering painterly indulgences -
she puts the fauve into faux naive - the immediacy of her approach is the
key. Some scenes carry written explications in biro; the walls of her
theatres are faced with coarse anaglypta. Despite the indulgence on stage
there¹s a fierce and even moral economy in their execution.

Luxe calme et volupte turned a little sour - in fact a Neue
Sachlichkeit of polydiscos, bacardi breezers and running mascara. The
delicacy of the handling of the materials matches her deft plotting in
theatrical terms (her mise en scene equally so). The emotions and psychology
of her protagonists in their slew of accessories and props, sidestepping the
trap of glibness in either execution or thought, have an abstract grace that
only the most sophisticated of story-tellers can manage.

KeranJames/Michael Keenan, co-directors at studio1.1, 2009

<<Back to exhibitions