JULIAN OPIE, LISSON GALLERY, LONDON NW1 through 17 March
This artist has evolved a personal, formal language
, minimalist, yet figurative, which is wholly his own. There is
a curious affinity with the semantic figures which adorn road crossing
signs, or indicate the gender and location of public toilet facilities.
The current nudes are a case in point, painted
onto building blocks, they remain firmly two dimensional. Opie’s
work takes Warhol’s aesthetic flip to new extremes., also of
pricing up., at 30,000 upwards. What makes the stick figures and
road language interesting is the way in which the mandatory element
in such signing, when confronted in open space, that is, is deliberately
subverted. Since this fulfils a traditional imperative for the artist
in relation to social convention, Opie is to be congratulated for
the direction he has taken in this idiom, and the mood which he
has sustained. There is something too, of a gestural message against
overweaning bureaucracy. Opie’s figures, seemingly divested
of any special facial characteristics, yet remain a differentiated
species all the same.
MICHAEL LANDY at C&A, is an artist of
the same generation, who has chosen to go beyond signification to
termination, the final destruction of his own work. It was possible
to go straight from Opie’s show at the Lisson Gallery (careful
crossing the Euston Road) and so down to Oxford Street, to observe
Landy liquidating his total personal possessions, through his SAAB,
his knick knacks, personalia, the shirt off his back, down to his
underpants. This is a day by day process, shortly and inevitable
to run to a close – so it would be logical to shred these too
on the last day, rather than keep laundering on.
