Damien Meade

"Damien Meade. Idols Without a Cult" Damien Meade paints clay sculptures that no longer exist, and each of his ambiguous figures is what remains, in painting, of a body brought into the world only to be unmade. His process always begins with innumerable heads and figures that he models, manipulates, photographs and kneads back into undifferentiated matter - often within a few hours, pressed by the urgency of the next - until one of them holds his gaze long enough to impose its own pictorial transubstantiation. Meade describes leaving the gestural instinct to suggest forms in this first phase and only intervening rationally at a later stage to single out, from the creatures that have survived the cull, the one that continues to demand attention. This process draws its origin and meaning from the awareness - obvious, even if generally overlooked - that oil paint and clay are both mineral matters reduced to powder and suspended in a fluid binder. For this reason, unlike any other subject, painting a clay model means not only restoring its verisimilar appearance, but replicating its existence on a two-dimensional surface through a substance chemically akin to it, triggering a material short circuit that is decisive for the artist’s poetics. One of the principal hypotheses on the origin of terrestrial life1 holds that approximately four billion years ago, near the hydrothermal vents of the ocean floor, inert mineral matter made the most radical categorical leap imaginable. According to this theory, in an infinitesimal instant, through a perhaps unrepeatable conjunction of chance, some simple inorganic molecules began combining into increasingly complex compounds, until reaching the critical threshold at which a chemical system becomes capable of self-sustaining and replicating, beginning to live in rudimentary form. And it is precisely this primal passage from the inanimate to the animate that Meade’s practice reactivates each time, on a minimal scale, in the artificial microclimate of the studio. From an iconographic point of view, his research thus confluences into a millennial lineage that moves from a conception of artistic creation as an act capable of breathing vital efficacy into the work - to which both the earliest idols and cult images and today’s artificial intelligences are traceable, shaped in our image as the gods once were. His works - at once alive and dead, archaic and futuristic, regal and residual - materialize and stabilize on the canvas with surprising immediacy a liminal condition between opposing states that refuse to resolve themselves into one another. At a more detailed level of reading, this reflection on matter - the first premise of Meade’s work - opens onto an equally close dialogue with the history of painting, of which he is a sensitive connoisseur. In the portraits, the artist revisits without historicist nostalgia the lexicon of power and status from the European portrait tradition - from Piero della Francesca to Rembrandt - bending it to a presentiment of misfortune that makes it an instrument for reading the present. His heads are effigies of an anonymous and ephemeral referent that seem to come from a time of rigid hierarchies and yet announce the imminence of a new feudal order, that of oligarchs and machines. But the matter ennobled by the portrait remains, literally, mud: clay is a substance scatological by nature, and the dignity conferred upon it by painting is inseparable from its prosaic origin. It is precisely in this friction that Meade locates the point at which the image gains its power: not in formal correctness, harbinger of a superficial habituation, but in its fallibility and vulnerability. The two large figures appearing in this exhibition continue a previous cycle centered on a triptych of embryonic women, not fully endowed with limbs, whom the artist imagined as Shakespearean witches balanced between the premonition and the incarnation of calamity. Direct descendants of that group, here they dance alone through the night. This vision for Meade speaks of the survival of those who persevere in the dark, but at this point, cannot help but evoke in a broader sense the mystery of artistic gestation upon which his research has insisted from the outset. The illumination, in all the paintings, always comes from the left as in Western religious painting from Beato Angelico onward, obeying a convention that makes the trajectory of divine light coincide with the direction of reading and writing. The eye, moving across the image, encounters first the solidity of the illuminated form, then slips into the darkness that consumes it - matrix and stage for infinite other forms to come - an optical grammar that, almost inevitably, bestows upon the subject the status of icon. And when the eyes, in these faces, are open rather than closed in absorbed interiority, Meade works on the reciprocity of a gaze capable of returning the attention, awakening at the moment it is watched. But how is it possible to explain empathy - which nonetheless arises so powerfully - for something that declares, through its exhibited nature, never to have been alive? It is the same question that today anyone who becomes attached to an artificial intelligence must ask oneself, but Meade prefers to leave his disturbing figures mute, contrived to be interrogated rather than explained. Shaped through a pre-logical procedure, these threshold-entities seem to return our gaze only to leave us alone, in that exchange, with the question of what, exactly, we are looking at.