RECENT WORKS BY DAVID JOLLY
David Jolly is a painter. But saying this seems almost misleading because what the viewer appears to see in his work is a photographic image. From a distance (and some times close up) the paintings look like photographs. It is a clever conceptual deceit that immediately engages with the idea of the medium in contemporary art.
There has been considerable critical anxiety about the blurring of disciplinary boundaries in the visual arts over the last ten years but much of it has focussed on installation art. This is surprising since the discipline most effected by other disciplines is surely painting. Painting and photography have had an incredibly productive relationship since the nineteenth century. But every time an art historian, a critic or a curator brings this up, there is a ruck of medium defenders bickering about mark making and painterly techniques.
Charles Baudelaire would not acknowledge photography as art and called it art’s humble servant, a mechanical form of representation that could never hope to compete with the expressive talents rendered in painting (Salon of 1859). Years later Peter Galassi got a critical spanking for suggesting that photography changed the way in which artists saw the world. His exhibition ‘Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1981 caused an incredible stir not least because his agenda presumed an aesthetic history and an art status for photography. Critics squabbled over whether or not photography influenced art, with some arguing that art was ‘photographic’ before photography. However we unpack the debates, one thing is for sure, the relationship between photography and art—especially painting—has always been dynamic and sometimes troubled, especially when... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline