At one point in “Luces de Bohemia,” Valle-Inclán speaks through the mouth of his protagonist, Max Estrella: “Classical heroes reflected in concave mirrors give the Esperpento. The tragic sense of life can only be given with a systematically deformed aesthetic.”
David Shrigley’s drawings allude to the darkest side of everyday existence. They are direct, uncompromising, and show the most absurd aspects of our society. For him, “humor is just the sugar with which the message is decorated to make it sweeter.” With a “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, absolutely personal and “low tech,” Shrigley uses multiple formats (drawings, animations, sculptures, posters, installations, web pages, photographs, multiples, postcards, album covers, books and t-shirts) to make his work more accessible. Artist, musician and filmmaker, Shrigley uses text – including cross-outs – to add meaning to his drawings.
The Shrigley universe (which is well documented on his website: http://www.davidshrigley.com) is dominated by an almost childlike cruelty and a fascination with aspects not linked to the adult world, that is, to a world governed by rules and conventions. Thus, dirt, fluids, animals, insects, monsters or absolutely asocial characters populate his works. This is how Katrina M. Brown explained it in a text about the artist: “In Shrigley’s work we find an unavoidable humor. However, it is not a light and brilliant wit, but rather, markedly sinister and with a tendency towards what is inferior in life.” Insects, fluids, dirt, what is hidden appear in the foreground. Like the crowded beings with surprised eyes in his work “The Contents of the Gap between the Refrigerator and the Cooker”, or in other words, all the germs, little animals, rubbish, food scraps and other imaginable and unimaginable elements that accumulate over the years in spaces as invisible as the gap between the refrigerator and the kitchen. They are all the product of fantasy, or rather, of nightmare, and evoke a whole world alien to norms and conventions, alien to control and appearances.
The protagonists of his works tend to be strange, sociopathic, cruel and endearing characters at the same time, who experience situations that reveal strange logic and in which fear, phobias, love, cruelty and also tenderness make an appearance. This is the case of Pete, the unbalanced protagonist of the animation “Who I am and what I want”, made in collaboration with Chris Shepherd. Pete tells us about his life, his desires and his dreams. He tells the story of a life of excess that has led him to move away from the fierce competitiveness of the city and exile himself in the forest, where he lives with animals. The strange becomes the usual, the ordinary gives way to the extraordinary.
There is a tender and subtle David Shrigley, as when he takes a photograph of a balloon with a smiley face that appears between the sheets of an unmade bed. However, there is also a more acidic and bitter Shrigley, who presents a stuffed cat without a head, a stuffed squirrel that holds its head in its hands as if it were a nut or a tooth full of cavities in front of a mirror (“What Decay Looks Like”).
The two works that David Shrigley presents at the Santa Monica Art Center do not clearly show the artist’s language. In both the animation “Sleep” and the installation “Insects,” humor is not the most prominent element. On this occasion, Shrigley dispenses with the sugar that could sweeten the message. “Sleep” has no clear beginning or end. During the eight minutes that the animation lasts, the action is reduced to a man (not exactly physically pleasant) lying in his bed sleeping, breathing deeply, sometimes moving his hands slightly, changing the position of his head and modifying his expression depending on his dreams. Perhaps his dreams appear to be populated by a strange universe, the one we find on the second floor, populated by an army of insects and other elements, very homemade, with metal bodies and a thousand imaginable shapes. Once again, dreams and insects escape from norms, control and conventions. They move in a territory of non-consciousness, in the realm of the latent, the hidden, in an asocial space where all fears, doubts and insecurities surface. They are reflected and they reflect us in concave mirrors that do nothing but bring to light tremendously human aspects.
Montse Badia
September 2008
