Lies, damn lies and plain untruths
More truth / More intelligence / Ha Ha
More future / More laughs / More culture
I need more than an ordinary grind
And the more I think the more I need.
- James Osterberg
Shane Kneipp's paintings in his recent showing at Milburn + Arté have their origins in the annexation of popular media images, the technological sublime of sixties comic strip heroes destined to literally crash down to earth, scrambling the graphic values of pulp magazines. Since the shapes and internal details of his images pre-exist, Kneipp's strategy could imply a certain forfeiture of artistic decision making. The messages and imagery from media sources have assumed a normative value, representing universal values.
Determining assumptions about life, death, and propriety. They are the nearest thing to models for personal and public modes of thought and behaviour. Behind the clichés and simple minded appeals lies some truth to which the culture subscribes. Yet the judgments Kneipp makes about the culture represented by these images is both satirical and ambiguous.
Through his explorations into the relationship between image and text he makes one aware of the fact that all language, visual as well as verbal is inherently metaphorical. Language, signs and pictures are not just aspects of our experience of the world. They are intimately related to how and what we experience, and what we understand by that experience. As with all language that of picturing is not a purely cerebral construct, but imbued with visceral, sensual qualities, further enhanced by Kneipp's choice of encaustic techniques in pieces such as Slouching towards Bethlehem.
For Kneipp, words themselves have the character of objects, their reified nature leading inevitably to a