[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]T[/dropcap]he claws! The claws!
Art’s ever-disputed purpose chokes, regurgitates and, eventually, masticates the fabric of society to emulsified pap, thus palatable to the prolish hordes. The once-radical relegated to the livingroom walls of those it originally served to shock. Dali’s nightmare turbulence, decaying eggs of crumbling death punctuated by drooping clocks and stretched elephants adorn the doorframes of well-fed media students whilst the barefaced effrontery of Monet’s studies in the refraction, reflection and diffusion of pure light is relegated to soft-focus wallpaper for retirement complex common rooms.
[quote] deep and calm benevolence
even in anger like a storm [/quote]
Art: to reflect the nature of the time it portrays, or to goad it into direct action? Where sits the revolutionary provocation of Goya’s ‘The Third of May 1808’ in this, or Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’, David’s ‘Oath of the Horatii’, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, or Exhibit B (even in 2014 London we are capable of shutting a controversial exhibition down) in this conundrum? No mere reflections of events these – images created to provoke reaction, iniciate rebellion, topple regimes. Something like the Pepperspray Cop meme, in fact.
Or perhaps, as Grayson Perry suggested at 2013’s Reith lectures (once he had run out of prepared notes and was onto the questions and answer session), art’s function is merely to create things that are beautiful. (Like pwetty dwesses and pwant pots?)
All this as preamble, directing the brainwaves to the leftbrain synapse clusters in preparation for Uneri‘s ‘Pict01’:
Uneri, ‘Pict01’
In what may very well be a Trebuchet exclusive, Uneri’s work – a stylised representation of the archetypal female at once reminsicent of Matisse’s ‘Blue Nude’, Wolfgan Paalen’s post- surrealist interpretations of Pacific Northwest first nation carvings and the ever-fluvial Anna Livia Plurabella of Finnegans Wake – evokes the eternal qualities and questions of gynocriticism.
It is, if you will, a visual ecriture feminine: are those plump breasts there to nourish or seduce? Is the clawlike aspect of her fingers a reference to the cruelty in beauty or the fierce strength that lies beneath the exterior allure of Woman? Is she squirting?
Uneri is oblique and elusive in the scant communication:
‘Hellow,I’m Japanese Painter.
Please come to watch my “UNERI PICTURE’S homepage”.
http://uneri.sakura.ne.jp/ The one picture are attached to this email.’
But, compounding the enigma, offers opaque exigesis in verse:
——-UNERI CONCEPT——-
UNDULATION of heart….lying behind women’s emotions.
I can’t help feeling deep and calm benevolence
even in anger like a storm or in groundswell of sorrow..
I embody these invisible UNDULATION of heart,that is binevolence.
And I call it wu ne ri.
Trebuchet has little to add, preferring to ruminate in the Zen causality of unsolicited artworks to the editors’ inbox and the innate applicability of our own hemisphere’s approbation of the Gaia/Earth Mother tradition. Proving the universality of human experience and the artwork it inspires, our own deep folk lays evoke a similar feminine duality:
T’was on the bridge at midnight,
Her lips were all a’ quiver,
She gave a cough,
Her leg fell off,
And floated down the river.
Uneri’s artwork can be viewed at http://uneri.sakura.ne.jp/ , apparently.
An observer first and foremost, Sean Keenan takes what he sees and forges words from the pictures. Media, critique, exuberant analysis and occasional remorse.
