I'm posting this review after the show closed last week, for which I'm sorry. It's a pity because it was a decent show. The show was called Telling Fibs: An Exhibition of Lies, and some works did indeed achieve the elegance of a good lie.

While some of the didactic works were a bit ham-handed (Some bordering on the Sunscreen Song: "Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly", a protest so obvious but so useless), the Skull works kept me at the show. Firstly they're a big move away from the type of work Warren is known for producing (streety paintings, some of which could still be seen), which had a formulaic ring to them: the Sean Landers doodly thing, fun but not for long. Mere misrepresentations, not decent lies.

Secondly, I love books. The skulls were moulded out of pulped first editions of Peter Pan, Moby Dick and Heidi. The tragedy, heart break, of seeing books destroyed, really hurt. It made the works a little incisive.

Essentially, the works were a complaint against the decay of the analogue against the march of the digital. Or a lament for a bygone era. It's not a point of view I agree with, although I have passion for paper I have faith in the Internet. Nostalgia for a past we didn't live in is just another way of packaging history into accessible bytes. It's a lie we tell ourselves. But it is a view that I can sympathise with. Unlimited access to information (almost) has made the world a harder place to navigate. It has killed off the page, to an extent, as Warren implies. But the important bits of the page, the black parts, are alive and well.

Update: I somehow managed to not mention the artist's full name. It's Warren Lewis in case you were wondering what the fuck I was on about.

Labels: contemporary art, south african art, warren lewis