Do the Pop Psychobabble test to discover your inner art critic!

(Copies of this mock ‘artist statement’ were handed out during the opening of the exhibition Ghost Shapes, held in Wild Cherry gallery, London E2, in Feb 2009)

Which of these statements do you feel most in sync with today?  Choose at random.

1. Talk in a nasal voice about the gestural qualities of the pencil marks. Show off your knowledge and do some name-dropping. Make a discreet reference to Cy Twombly, and then contradict it to magnify your clarity of thought. Notice how the gestures seen here are too controlled, the mark making is not raw and spontaneous like Cy’s. We must also, therefore, eliminate any connections to Abstract Expressionism (Barnett Newman? Actually, yes in terms of the rigidity, but we discount it because these works are about line, not colour like Hard-Edge). Ultimately these works will appear to you as pathetic in the infirm sense, their pale backgrounds are eclipsing bohemian life, killing spontaneity, and the operatic grand finale expires with stark deadly dark organisms commanding our attention. Today you are the well-read ponce, an elegantly sophisticated, superficial high-nose attached to a person. The world admires a savant, so get yourself chatted up, and that will have made it worthwhile for you to come to this exhibition.

2. As you walk around, you delight in reminiscing about your long-gone biology lessons and feel again the joy of looking through a microscope and watching the movements of sub-human life. The artist here is clearly influenced by fractals and amoebas. Maybe even leaves and other commonplace stuff, approving of Natural Design. From an artistic point of view, you’re not sure about the tapeworm figures, but low-life exists for the continuation of the food chain, after all. It’s great that it’s mostly black and white stuff, and grainy, because that reminds you of those yellowing photos from which you learnt the Latin names of creatures that you would have loved to clone and experiment with, if you had had the funding to do lab research. Anyway. You enjoy this exhibition because the artist, like you, is surely a rational and meticulous person that refutes nonsensical extra-empirical beliefs. There is no hidden agenda from a tortured soul, this is about plain and pragmatic pencil and the origin of the species.

3. The Feng Shui in this gallery creates a positive vibe. The four colourful paintings balance the steady calm of the drawings. It is safe to be here, it will re-energise your mind and spirit. Here is art announcing the Age of Aquarius, inherited from psychedelia. Whirling lines and out-of-space patterns look like the trance visions you had at that beach party 3 summers ago. It definitely suits your mood, it is auspicious that you came here today. Perceptive as you are, you smile at the little details, when you notice how the shapes turn into funny little creatures that wink at you. They’re floating. It’s lucky that you didn’t come tomorrow, when the large voluminous masses of dark knots in the drawings would herald ominous messages warning humanity that destruction is near. Meteorites will one day crash our greed and our plundering ways, but until then you will work on your holistic and peaceful aura, and you will buy one of these paintings to massage your bedroom into a relaxed sanctuary.

4. As a good communicator with great social skills, you have learnt that the artist is half Spanish. You should have guessed, seeing those Quixotic giants indomitably rebelling over the hazy, flat plains. Intuitively, you can also tell that the artist has expressed a quiet and introspective part of herself. The delicate feminine care that has gone into patiently building each image like antique embroidery. Art invariably must express the state of mind of the artist, you argue. Yes, there is an element of zeitgeist in everything one does, artist or not, as we cannot escape our binding culture, you counteract to your opposing art critic. But you know that feelings are the dominant mover of artistic imagination. You inform other viewers that Spanish art has as historically produced as many dark and gloomy examples as it has of hot, colourful Mediterranean images. The grey drawings must have been made in England, you surmise. An artist responds to their immediate environment. As you mull around, talking to all and sundry, you agree vehemently with the interpretations you hear. But you don’t just paraphrase, you know full well what you are talking about when you comment on the intensity of emotion concentrated in each mark. As a vibrant and passionate person, you empathise with the artist’s capacity to compact elations and depressions into a graphic square. That is, after all, the meaning of art.

Now, whichever art critic you become today, please enjoy the show. Have a laugh!

© Cristina Nualart, 2009