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The Bassoonist
The Bassoonist Paintings by Rory Dean
September 12-October 11, 2014
The Petrified Forest Gallery
Copyright: Rory Dean and The Petrified Forest Gallery, 2014. All rights reserved. www.thepetrifiedforestgallery.com www.rorydean.com
Contents
Statement by Rory Dean 7 Images 8-30 Essays Fuck up by Joe Becker 32-34 On the Recent Wok of Rory Dean by Matthew Purvis 35-37 CV 38-39
A bassoon is a specialized instrument. It may sound beautiful when played but I could not decipher its sound when played by a master or a novice and its existence in this moment in time may or may not be relevant in the year 2014 . The paintings in this exhibition are made with this type of pessimism in mind and an indefatigable self-deprecating sense of humour which also may or may not be relevant in the year 2014. - Rory Dean
Im ag
s e
Artist statement
OEUVRE Chalk & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Self-Indulgence Pencil & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Begetting Success Chalk & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Whoop Dee-Doo Chalk & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Internet Prick Winner Watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Bildungsroman Watercolour 18”x24” 2014
This is All You Need to Know Watercolour 20”x32” 2014
Dear John Pencil & pencil crayon 20”x32” 2012-2014
Non-Sequitur Chalk & watercoluor 18”x24” 2014
The Botch Job Chalk & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
W.E. Directed by MADONNA Watercolour 18”x24” 2013
And So It Was Written in the Stars Watercolor & pencil 18”x24”, 2013
You Just Can’t Say What You Want Anymore Chalk & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Bebe-Bebe Lipstick & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Bunga Bunga Lipstick, chalk & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Inconceivable Folly Pencil & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Saskatoon Pencil & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
I’m a Peep-Creep Watercolour collage 32”x44” 2011-2014
Persephone Watercolour collage 32”x44” 2010-2014
Your Profession Watercolour collage 32”x44” 2011-2014
Slam Junk Watercolour collage 32”x44” 2006-2014
Teen Worship Lipstick, pencil & watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Cindy Watercolour 18”x24” 2014
Essays
By the time you turn 30 you can probably count the number of friends you have on 1 hand. Normal people over time pair up with a girlfriend or boyfriend and what usually happens is either they or you will realize that the majority of your friends (and the overwhelming majority of theirs) are fucking losers, especially in my case. That is precisely when an unconscious negotiation takes place and you then slowly start to make the appropriate cuts. I am no different than anybody else. I never really had many friends growing up but the ones I did have are usually a different breed of fuck up. A type of fuck up that makes you feel better about yourself for not being the one who takes their shirt off and terrifies classmates by throwing chairs at them during a severe mental breakdown in the seventh grade. Nor are you the fuck up who shits in shampoo bottles at house parties in high school and then years later confides in you with a straight face that god has allowed them the power to control their dreams. They make you feel good because at least it isn’t you that has trapped yourself in a closet while your drug fucked mind tries to process reality all the while squirting out shit after shit into a large cooking pot and then convinces your terrified girlfriend to empty it on command into a toilet in the other room. Nor are you the lonely depraved type of fuck up who passes out drunk on the kitchen floor of your friend’s mouse infested shit hole surrounded by ripped open garbage bags with unspeakable odors and matter strewn all over the place for mice to gorge on. All the while a dried up mummified corpse of a squirrel that you stopped to pick up off the street in the middle of the day in front of strangers hangs on the wall somehow overlooking everything with its rotted out eyeballs that look like dried up dates. Fuck ups build long lasting time tested bonds that last for what seems eternity even though it may only be 10 years. Rory Dean fits into this file along with an assortment of other garbage pail kids that I proudly call friends. Rory Dean in particular is an unusual type of fuck up and it’s because of this, and by default because of the type of fuck up that I am, that we have built a long and sustainable friendship. He has seen me at my absolute lowest and I have seen him at unspeakable depths doing incredibly fascinating and absolutely deplorable behavior. But don’t be fooled by him, never write him off as the breed of fuck up who has nothing going for them and who you hang around solely because nobody else will. Rory Dean surprised me from the beginning as the rarest breed of fuck up and that is the talented fuck up. As rare as a Liger that gives birth to a white lion cub Rory is quite unique in the fact that he is possibly one of the most gifted painters I have ever met. I have been engaged with his work right from the beginning of our friendship and Rory and I have had a healthy competition that lasts to this day 10 years later. It was only 6 or 7 months ago that I was talking to him and he told me he was going to paint Guns ‘n Roses. I laughed as anyone would when someone says something
like that. I asked “why” and he replied “look how fucking stupid they look” and showed me a photo of the band on the cover of a Rolling Stone magazine. Wearing mostly leather, these eunuchs did their best to come off as threatening and dangerous wearing bandanas, top hats, tattoos and smoking cigarettes, but to realize they are roughly my age trying to pull off menacing and cool but looking more like the characters from a McDonald’s commercial. They took on a high level of absurdity and they seemed to cry out and demand “PAINT ME.” For me most artist’s today who try to make art that is “trying to engage” to “question” to “appropriate” to “investigate” fall short and the millisecond I take looking at it leaves me feeling bored and slightly ripped off. With Rory you will not be bored, you may not like it but you will remember it and strictly from personal experience as a painter I will take that, the worst thing you can say about my work is that it is boring, if you hate it fine, if you love it fine but being bored means I failed. I think of Rory’s work much the same. There are certain paintings he created that are burned into my mind, the KKK ghosts in particular was an idea that I felt jealous of and I wish I thought of it first. I really love that body of work. I think to this day that that work is truly very underrated. If we had followed through on our proposed two person show and had we had a better gallery at the time and a dealer who was willing to take a chance on the work I think it would have been the most memorable show of the year. It is Rory’s intuitiveness that I admire the most. He goes about selecting images on a strictly esthetic choice, he is akin to the the Flemish masters when working without the restrictions of the court, the church or their numerous patrons. When they painted in their spare time they painted anything from dirty paintings of a sexual nature, their children, their wives, their friends or dog or anything else that seemed to please them. When success was not an option like in the works of Adrian Brouwer, that’s when the true magic happened and you get works of tavern patrons robbing, fighting, fucking or any other debauchery one could have in these seedy settings. It is in this branch of painting that I would hang Rory from. His work is made truly from the gut and with the intent to challenge or annoy, antagonize or to wake you up and propose an alternative from the funk that stinks in a lot of post graduate bland academic painting. COUGH …RBC painting competition…… COUGH… excuse me. Rory’s new work came completely from left field. Gone are the KKK ghosts, the eerie little children with outdated science equipment, bugs or large monkeys lurking in the shadows all of which were previously drenched in caribbean blue. Now we see kitschy imagery deemed déclassé in art painted more liberally with splashes of garish neon to accentuate their features all to make the new work look like a rainbow bright nightmare. Kobe Bryant, Steve Jobs, Big Trouble in Little China, Axl Rose, downs syndrome children, Gary Oldman, the pope, Elvis and any other image he can get his hands on can become one of his drawings or paintings without a hesitation. It is this freedom from painting the jewel like intricate details of his past work that has liberated Dean’s work and brought it to new heights of absurdity and playfulness. The new work is not for the faint of heart and it’s not for your living room. He consciously makes reactionary work directed solely at the type of work he is rebelling against. To say that this work comes from bitterness or contempt would not be false nor is it entirely accurate. I tend not to look at this work as coming from a negative place but it is the work an artist in transition freeing himself from his own constraints as a painter and broadening his own approach to the problems of making a painting today. At the core of his work is a honest sincerity to painting, and ask anyone who paints and they will tell you that you can’t ask for much more. To call him a painter’s painter is fucking gay and I am not going to do but for lack of a better term that’s exactly what he is. If you don’t like Rory Dean’s painting than there is something wrong with you.
If you don't like Keyshawn Johnson, you got a problem with yourself. That's the way I look at it. - Keyshawn Johnson. 2003
I would be lying if I didn’t say Rory was one of my biggest influences, It was with that Guns N’ Roses painting that spawned and entire series of pop paintings in my own studio (grandma’s basement). Some 30 paintings or so just because of his decision to paint that cover, seeing it in his studio sent me reeling and validated a lot of my own ideas I was having around the same time, I figured if Rory can paint G’N’R than I CAN paint Oprah taking a shit in the woods, as weird as that seems it makes perfect sense to us. In the end I wanted to say that Rory Dean uses Chanel deodorant and I am glad I have fuck up for a friend. Joe Becker 2011
At present, there is no means of making something pass as ugly or repulsive. Even shit is pretty. - Michel Leiris
Rory Dean can be rather unpredictable. As soon as I think I know what he's doing he starts doing things that knock the crap out of me. That could be because there's something essentially irrational about his work. Not that it's inconsistent: there's a great deal of continuity between one distinct set of works and another. The unpredictability comes from what he suddenly decides to attack and how. His work isn't critical - it's adversarial, often taking some concrete aspect of the art world as its object of spite and scorn. This attack isn't always direct and it tends to involve a shift in style. While his earlier paintings took a swipe at the obsession with crass textures and colour that have been selling so well lately, his recent works push along to some of the other trends currently underway. These new works, consciously or not, come in the middle of two of the biggest retro fads to have taken hold of the art market in the past couple of years: the return of decorative abstraction and language based art. There's a new cult of the latter evolving, mostly out of a revisiting of certain aspects of 70s Conceptual art. It was, in its origin, a strange Neo-Platonic pyramid scheme, sometimes mystical, comic or banal. Often all three. Such an 'ideologization', as Piero Raffa once put it, was meant to get its kicks from extracting the 'surplus of rational selfconsciousness'. In its second coming, however, this neurotic abreaction to the material world tends more to the narrative, the anecdotal and the sentimental. The most genuinely bourgeois art has now become neo-classical in the worst sense of the term. Dean's work seems to be completely taking the piss out of these trends, uniting what were originally warring reactionary positions in a compost heap that robs them of any integrity. His words don't communicate. He doesn't have a message, a concept, or an idea. He isn't crocheting letters for nihilism either. There's no eloquence or token profundity in spelling out 'Steve Guttenberg', although it could count as an invective. He's not just some aesthete either, even though his work is almost inevitably pretty. It's a kind of deflatable prettiness – deflatable because it's inflated in a deliberately hideous way, like a blow-up doll wearing lingerie stitched together from the town drunk's old socks. The charm of Dean's work is in his spite. It's never simply nasty though. If he hurls shit at people it's because he knows we live in it and attempting to conceptualize your way out of it only makes it more absurdly laughable. His mockery of deflated art dreams is bitter and sardonic, a self-depreciation that only adds to the sense of leveling. This seems to be what fuels the kind of vicious humour that gives the work its bite. It's here that the work flirts with irony but never
succumbs to it. Irony inevitably requires a moral stability and there really isn't any moralizing going on, just a kind of discharge. A demonstration of a strangely basic kind of labour happening here. It's not the melodramatic Victorian factory kind, but more of the cottage industry for a geeky high school girl variety. That's why you find pencil crayon drawings of Justin Bieber, along with mock maudlin drawings of odd looking children that recall the dislocated sensibility of Prudence Heward. His text works aren't anything like Graham Gillmore's similarly colourful text pieces. In the latter's case, sense has to be re-established thanks to the discombobulation of letters and fragmenting of narrative. It asks for an investment through a momentary illegibility. Using the vaguely familiar, Dean's work assumes the investment at the outset and then cancels it, bankrupting the process and throwing away whatever meaning could be culled as profit. There's less to them than there appears. They aren't paintings about the surface but of the hollowness which it occludes. Accompanying this use of words is a leap into the use of rainbows, generally done in watercolour. The rainbows, one can suggest, are the fulfillment of their earlier appearance with his KKK garbed figures. In those images, the rainbows popped up like sentimental trinkets or magical powers – the psychotic accouterments of characters who always saw the world in black and white, or black and blue at any rate. But that world, the one of meaning in all of its stubborn idiocy, has given way to full spectrum stupidity. The engulfing rainbow is a series of essences, superficially like the pure essences that were so sacred to Mondrian or Kandinsky, but not really like them at all. For here there is no scent of the drive for the pure, that medical stench which the synesthetically blessed could find wafting out of the Russian's canvases. Instead, there's a real impurity, a sense of colour as the chaotic effect of light decay. They may be a conscious reference to the rainbow colour schemes of Franz Marc, but they are completely devoid of his utopian desire to save humanity with art. In fact, the rainbow sets the limits of anthropomorphic visual perception. Spiders, fish and many mammals experience a substantially different, far more complex and varied array of colours. That human beings like to imagine there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow points out how sensually impoverished we are. The rainbow is a wink at one of the many evolutionary abortions that continue to rot within our brains. Dean's rainbows fill up the iconic lines of his mediocre public figures, or they hover beneath the twinkle of his words. And sometimes they sit alone on their own page like Hell rendered as a full-spectrum colour field painting. They aren't exercises in the faddish abstraction that's currently spilling around the galleries. They aren't nostalgic, sentimental or even decorative. Dean manages to paint rainbows that nearly seem to sneer in their vacuous idiocy. But is that because he realizes that abstract expressionism in painting is almost the same thing as the expressive pop metal of Guns N' Roses and that the art market tries to cast someone like Jackson Pollock as a kind of Axl Rose? Maybe, but it's probably not that conscious. Dean is using the pathos-laden colour field to deflate things rather than instill them with the metaphysical gravitas they generically denote. This happens in two ways. First: by using the spectrum rather than a reduced set of variations on minimal hues, he disintegrates the sense of a localized integrity with its own individual decomposition, opening up each hue to its unremarkable demise, robbing it of its monadic pathos and leveling it in relativity. It isn't harmony but a spectral decay. The rainbow has an excretory function, much the way it is played out on a more figurative level by his colleague Joe Becker. Second: by placing the glittering and hollowed out names of D-List celebrities on top of them as personalized icons robbed of a face. This is intriguing given Dean's other recent propensity for displaying recognizable pop figures through a rainbow which erodes the singularity of their faces. With the names, the less familiar are
rendered legible but vague. The schmaltzy lettering itself is already a deflation and mockery of the optimism of cultural up-and-comers. These are the faces of those who dwell in a Hell for the mediocre. The Hell that Dean depicts is a proper Hell with a properly sardonic eschatology. It's not one of misery and tortures but of the petulant crapulence that this world consists of. His KKK figures now start to morph into rocks and mountain ridges for an alien planet. The world is in the distance, ruled over by demons, the countries running into each other like the cultivated blocks of 'expression'. Dean is a narrative painter whose characters don't really have a story. Losers, creeps and failed exercises in machismo, they're all abortions mired in shit, but the only shit art is capable of – pretty shit. Matthew Purvis 2011
Rory Dean Born 1981, Brantford, Ontario, CAN. Education 2001-2006 BFA Ontario College of Art and Design (O.C.A.D.University), Toronto, CAN. Solo Exhibitions 2014 2013 2012 2011 2008
The Bassoonist, The Petrified Forest Gallery, London, CAN Either Way I’m Always #winning, The Painted Bird, San Francisco, USA If I Can Just Survive One More Night On Pervert’s Row, Topdown Bottomup, Vancouver, CAN Fuck It, Fuck Art &Fuck You, Ctrl Lab, Montreal, CAN Rory Dean: Paintings, Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto, CAN
Group Exhibitions 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010
2008 2007 2006 2005
2004
2003 2002
Moving Sale, TwoThirty Gallery, NY, USA No Homo, PFOAC221, Montreal, CAN theresnothinglolaboutrip, Galerie Coatcheck, Montreal, CAN Fandom, Gendai Gallery, Toronto, CAN Art Connects New York, NY, USA. High Roller Society, Savant, London, UK Lovable Badass:Artists on Artest, Narwhal Art Projects, Toronto, CAN The Unicorn, Narwhal Art Projects, Toronto, CAN OCADU:Where They Are Now, Toronto, CAN The Unicorn, Narwhal Art Projects, Toronto, CAN New Directions II: The Prophesy, Toronto, CAN CLIMAX: Fundraiser&Silent Auction, Toronto, CAN Scope, Christopher Cutts Gallery, New York, USA Summer Splash, Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto, CAN Blaze Days, Christopher Cutts Gallery, Toronto, CAN Graduate show, O.C.A.D. Toronto, CAN Basic Instincts, Spin Gallery, Toronto, CAN Drake Hotel, Toronto, CAN The Art of the Figure, O.C.A.D. Toronto, CAN Monkey See Monkey Do, Spin Gallery, Toronto, CAN Hinter Selections, Mind Control Gallery, Toronto, CAN Efficiency 2, Mind Control Gallery, Toronto, CAN String Gallery, Toronto, CAN Supernumerary, Fanny Larouche Artspace, Toronto, CAN Efficiency, Mind Control Gallery, Toronto, CAN The Art of the Figure, O.C.A.D. Toronto, CAN
Award 2005 Aboveground Art Award: O.C.A.D. Toronto, CAN Residency 2005
Drake Hotel, Toronto, CAN
Print Traum Noir #3-4. 2012.(Book) Poiesis:A Journal of the Arts&Communication, Vol.13, 2011.(Magazine) SSE Book:The End of the World. 2011.(Book) Beautiful Decay-Book #3:The Underdogs. 2010.(Book) Narwhal Art Projects Publication: A Cabinet of Blunders. 2010.(Book) Globe&Mail. Gary Michael Dolt: “Gallery Going”, March 18, 2006.(Newspaper) The National Post. Catherine Dean: “The Big Picture”, December 6, 2003.(Newspaper)