Handbag Painting

" A Trojan Horse where good and bad are iron-clad" LG White EXIT “SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC” – Francis Alÿs: The Green Line; David Zwirner Gallery, New York, USA; Feb / March 2007. The Dutch and London-based LG White commences Jan Dhaese's 2017 gallery exhibition program with a new and eye-catching series of paintings and installations. Inspired by recent political changes and intended as a form of protest against many of those cursed events White deliberately delivers pictorial eclecticism and compositional disharmony. Presented in “EXIT” her artistic disobedience involuntarily questions the contemporary potential of politically engaged art. The aforementioned quotation is a line that accompanies the display of a performed action by Francis Alÿs; a key example of an artist who is internationally acclaimed for addressing political tensions of past and present times. In his video installation, titled: “The Green Line” (2004), the artist is seen while walking and retracing the 1949 Armistice border that divides Israel and Palestine. This demarcation line corresponds to the military front of the 1948 War, runs through the heavily populated and important agricultural regions and divides Jerusalem into East and West Jerusalem. While walking, Alÿs carries a leaking can of green paint hereby causing the line to physically appear and manifest itself. As it would bring us too far from the main focus of this text I cannot begin to analyze the multiple and interconnected layers of “The Green Line”. However, in her exhibition artist LG White walks a similar, politically and socially disturbed line. Albeit in a different manner, White's displayed artwork equally provokes critical thoughts on situations of social and political conflict. One can't be blind to the apocalyptic intensity of White's solo exhibition. From her London-based art studio she witnesses a world that is going terribly wrong and she presents exactly that horror in a genuinely disgusted, cacophonous and eclectic way. Moreover, “EXIT” comes with a certain sense of artistic disobedience. Indeed, what's the point of creating images that hope to appeal and cater to the audience when at the same time the world continues to be a very sick place anyway? There's a lot of “anti” at work in White's exhibition. “EXIT”'s attitude is without doubt anti-fashion with its typical waves of impermanent and shallow sensation; anti-superficiality in a consumption-driven, saturated and wasteful world; anti-ignorance for our persistently alarming political devolution; anti-intellectualism for the sake of turbulent and unconstrained spontaneity, and, in a way, anti-itself. Why? Because the artist consciously aims at an impossible goal. Art is always committed to a prescribed, disciplinary context of organized display and thoughtful review. This renders any transgressive ambition irrevocably impotent. White's exhibition is therefor also reacting against itself. “EXIT” is an exhibition that somehow resents being an exhibition, or one that resents that it cannot be more than an exhibition. It resents its own nature and orders us to leave. Such self-critical, indulgent and experiential ventures are always both fragile and brave, and they allow us a sneak peek into the raging, labyrinth-like mind of the artist. At first sight, “EXIT” grotesquely mirrors the relentlessly growing tidal media-wave of images of misery and hopelessness. The exhibition is like a Parade of Disaster and it doesn't fail to include a portrait of badmouthed evil-doer of the moment U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump in proximity of an unsettling image of an almost seductive glancing Vladimir Putin as a child. Many of the exhibited images are painted in a translucent way because: “we are ALL a fading image”, the artist says. Amidst these shameless marchers we further recognize Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher, Teppichfresser Adolf Hitler and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, the Obamas and the Clintons, Wall Street's unpredictable Charging Bull, an anonymous and innocently laughing North-Korean boy, PVV's Geert Wilders, Brussels' rebellious ketje Manneken Pis, plastic toy soldiers, Lego's building blocks, and also includes references to Brexit and the tragedy of Greece. Luckily, “EXIT” is more than a loud and screaming, blockbuster-like scramble of images. The exhibition has a greater ambition. Between the lines of my conversation with the artist I noticed recurrent references to the process of consistent devolution, to the point of disappearance, towards eventual nothingness. That suggested state of nonexistence isn't in essence a negative prospect. In the artist's thought process about her exhibition it appears as an imminent, solution-offering implosion: the fact that in the end we will all disappear, everything will be gone, nothing lasts, everything is and will always be temporary. Although we are rationally unable to fully understand total nothingness, and although we are incapable to physically experience it, we can somehow sense it, perhaps imagine it. Such process of, as well as the result of intense distillation is impossible to paint, make, visualize, rationalize or explain. Yet, it forms the poetic and political undertone of LG White's “EXIT”. “(...) most images I will be exhibiting are about the grays, in-between, fading memories of a body that will inevitably become dust at some point.” Jan Van Woensel Independent Curator based in Antwerp, Belgium www.facebook.com/curatorjan

Painting:Oil on Wood

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:9.1 W x 11.8 H x 0.3 D in

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