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REVIEWS DAVID THORPE
DAVID THORPE
CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE, LONDON
27 APRIL – 1 JULY
David Thorpe’s installation The Defeated Life Restored (2007) is
unequivocally handsome, possessing all the requisite attributes:
it is beautifully wrought, commands the space with authority
yet withholds its mysterious intent. Indeed, many who enter the
enclosed space, bound by geometric-patterned wooden screens
and housing a series of exquisite watercolours and marquetry-clad
sculptures, swoon at its somewhat traditional values of excellent
craftsmanship and inscrutable aestheticism. The imagery appears to
be tightly bound by some internal logic and is self-referential to the
point of cabalism, and yet there are enough identifi able references
to hint at the nature of its ideological heart. It is tantalisingly aloof
but ultimately desirable – the consummate formula for wooing.
This is not intended as a derogatory characterisation, more an
analogy for Thorpe’s interleaving of such postmodernist strategies
as quotation, faux autonomy and self-mythologising. For the last
decade or so he has conducted a practice that has fabricated the
concomitant mythology of an obsessive and reclusive artist at
odds with canonical art history, evidenced by the work’s subject
matter as well as its facture. Through allusions to defunct cults,
counterculture and obsolete ideologies, and by purloining motifs
and visual languages from such arcane sources as Quakerism and
botanical illustration, Thorpe has always drawn on the outsider
while operating resolutely within the commercial artworld. And
yet, while many around him have been making bad paintings and
trash sculpture, he has rather ungroovily honed the techniques of
the artisan. In a feedback loop of artifi ce and genuine intention, this
laborious craftsmanship, which has evolved over the years from small
paper collages to installations more like mystical garden design,
substantiates the suggestion of a romantically isolated artist.
Of course we all know that the thrust of post-structural
The Defeated Life Restored, 2007 appropriationism and an awareness of art-historical context underpin this apparently self-engrossed practice, and
(installation view, Camden Arts
Centre, London). © the artist it is perhaps the metafi ctional impulse beyond the immediate fi ction that is more interesting. Thorpe’s botanical
and Camden Arts Centre. Courtesy
Maureen Paley, London illustrations recall those of Ernst Haeckel, the nineteenth-century evolutionary theorist who fudged observational
biological drawings by embellishing and idealising their forms into a sort of organic baroque. Thorpe’s impeccable
watercolours reduce plant forms to motifs through the sheer force of idealisation, so that a cone of red berries and
an impossible array of leaf shapes sprouting from a single stem become heraldic or allegorical in their perfection. But
whereas Haeckel’s motive was the consolidation of knowledge in a hierarchical, colonial world, Thorpe’s is the very
opposite. His wood and glass screens and missile-like sculptures quote from an array of esoteric belief systems, with
the geometry invariably encouraging an anachronistic sci-fi reading, so that notions of history, fact and intellectual
principality become unmoored. Thorpe authors images and objects as if they are isolated elements of a whole
aesthetic proposition, just as a fi lmmaker or novelist carves out a universe for characters to inhabit and events to
transpire. Given only the fragmentary rudiments of Thorpe’s universes, though, we can grasp more the contingency
of their manufacture than the af_f ect of their entirety. Sally O’Reilly
ARTREVIEW one.lintwo.lineight.lin
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