untitled no. 1

Untitled No. 1
Colour pencil, highlighter and marker pen on photocopied paper, 15x15cm, 2009

ART REVIEW
Untitled No. 1 (mixed media on photocopied paper)
By SS
On display at Gallerie McConaughey de la Fonte (25 Lorong Sedap)

Suggested head: Rainbow blight

By Fayë Wachowski-Hong

Part of an upcoming series that promises to offer stark new perspectives on the iconography of childhood nostalgia, this first piece by up-and-coming enfant terrible SS is both a blatant fuck-you to the art establishment's current obssesssion with faux-socialist heroic tableaus and a cerebral meditation on the importance of being earnest.

In traditional Pygmy culture, rainbows were believed to appear only when the souls of deceased family members wanted to reach out to surviving loved ones. In fact, this shimmering arc was a sometimes sinister symbol of the link between the living and the dead, and the oral epics of Pygmy lore are filled with nightmares of children dreaming about rotting grandparents sliding down rainbows into their beds.

It is this unsentimental, chilling emotional aura that SS draws on for this mixed media piece, which depicts a post-apocalyptic landscape where the sun has a demon-red core and throws off highlighter-yellow (and possibly radioactive) rays. Swollen pink clouds drip portentously with acid rain; the land itself is a barren desert of fallen stalks of barley.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the artist originally intended to use cotton balls to fill out the clouds, but was unable to find cotton with sufficient fluffiness. The final result is flatter, no doubt, but the eventual pink hue of the clouds also bear an unmistakeable resemblance to Swiss avant-garde maestro Rudin Svealler's collage of decayed cotton candy floss, although what is conceivably intended as a homage can more convincingly be construed as unimaginative tomfoolery.

The rainbow itself takes on a comparatively less vivid presence in the overall mise en scene, which does not bode well for SS's impending portraits of an exploding carousel, a Care Bears vs Smurfs skirmish and toy trains carrying replicas of Osama bin Laden. After all, if the point of it all is to subvert the innocence of childhood, one could argue that the objective is only weakly achieved when the final result is so pallid. But still, that hasn't stopped collectors from participating in a furious bidding war for this soon-to-be-ubiquitous artist's work. One can already find Untitled No. 1 reproduced on mugs and T-shirts everywhere. Can an entirely unironic reprint on nursery wallpaper be far behind?

This is what happens when a sub-editor who colours to destress meets a former art-fart writer who now reports on menopausal women's hair.