Rose Farrell and George Parkin
Repentance is the third in a series of exhibitions by Rose Farrell and George Parkin. It consists of twelve photographs of saints in religious pose before an archetypical scene. There are also four photographs of background scenes without the figures.
These photographs pursue the concern for the staged gesture that was present in their two prior exhibitions. Film Noir (1985) drew on the comic book images of black and white mystery cinema. And Red Squares (1986) was modelled on communist propaganda images that call for labour towards the collective end. As Film Noir is a photographic rendering of mystery cinema, and Red Squares occasionally imitates the paintings of Koma and Melamid, Repentance is modelled largely on the works of El Greco. The reference which disciplines the realism of Farrell and Parkin is to staged representation rather than its source in life.
All this is enough to set in motion the machinery of postmodern argument. But their work is not trained for great theoretical insight.1 More truth can be got from their workings on the eye than their contribution to our understanding of appropriation. As objects, the darkened colours of these photographs suggest an eggplant surface; they allow patches of reflected light to grant pleasure to the eye.
The figures themselves betray a pleasing dualism. Each model has been scrupulously made up to resemble the painterly reference. St. Jerome in Penitence shows a man whose body has been almost completely painted over; it suggests a figure that is rendered by brush rather than lens. The Virgin in Prayer presents a woman whose face is so heavily caked with paint that she looks more wooden than flesh. Yet the eye of