Daniel Craig-Martin, the paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts.
This is the third post on the Daniel Craig-Martin exhibition. You can see the first post here and the second post here
Beginning with two vibrantly coloured installations in 1993 and 1994, Craig-Martin's output came to be dominated by site-specific painted installations (see one such work in the Central Hall at the end of this post). By the second half of the 1990s, he brought what these projects taught him to the more traditional medium of paint, which has remained at the heart of his practice ever since.
The artist's use of the computer from the early 1990s marked a creative turning point for him. It freed him to alter his drawings' size and scale dramatically and gave access to an infinite range of colours. By the mid-2000s, as the world shifted from analogue to digital, he introduced depictions of laptops, mobile phones and memory sticks into his images, showing them from the front rather than from an angle. Around that time, Craig-Martin moved from painting on canvas to using aluminium panels, the smooth surface allowing him to create flatter drawings and more even areas of colour.
Cassette, 2002, (acrylic on canvas)
Self-Portrait
Pricks, 2020
Sharpener, 2002, (acrylic on canvas)
Las Meninas II, 2001, (acrylic on canvas)
Here, Craig-Martin pays homage to Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas (1656), replacing the figures in the original painting with contemporary objects. Velazquez locates the viewer in the position of the King and Queen whose portrait we see him painting, so that the spectator becomes the artist's subject. This alighs with Craig-Martin's career-long interest in the viewer's active involvement in the making of the artwork.
Velazquez's Las Meninas is probably the artwork that has fascinated artists most. You can read about it here .
Furthermore, in this post you can see some of the ways artists over the years have tried to grapple with painting that has fascinated them.
History Painting, 1995, (acrylic on aluminium)
One of Craig-Martin's earliest colour paintings, this work brings together two forms of expression. The artist explains: 'I've tried to reconcile certain aspects of abstraction and representation that are usually considered irreconcilable'. The bucket and the clipboard - both recurring motifs in Craig-Martin's early work - are assertively figurative, while the large blocks of clour-filled spaces hark back to Abstract Expressionism.
Bulb, 2014, (acrylic on aluminium)
Untitled (with suitcase), 2020, (acrylic on aluminium)
Space II, 2016, (acrylic on aluminium)
Untitled (Phone X), 2019, (acrylic on aluminium)
Word Paintings and Single Objects:
Untitled (art/blue), 2024, (acrylic on aluminium)
Recent Paintings:
Craig-Martin intends to make us aware of the ways in which we perceive the world. As the artist has stated, 'works of art can be meaningful without containing readily definable meaning. They are stimulants for our imagination, intended to be experienced not interpreted and are most useful when they provoke an unfamiliar experience'. He demonstrates how we can recognise objects no matter how unnaturalistic their colour or scale. When his work reduces the subject to a detail, we still easily identify them by completing them using our memory and imagination.