Chris de la Motte
IT IS WHAT IT IS
26 October - 12 November
Exhibition Catalogue: IT IS WHAT IT IS
PIERMARQ* Projects is pleased to present: IT IS WHAT IT IS, an exhibition of new work by Sydney-based artist, Chris de la Motte.
This series of paintings is about great painters, great paintings and painting itself. I wanted to celebrate my favourite paintings by my favourite baroque masters by taking their supreme compositions, depictions of the human form, landscape and use of colour and playing with them at will. By adding, subtracting and refinishing certain elements of these paintings with modern synthetic materials I get to create new compositions and dynamics while remaining somewhat loyal to the baroque tradition.
—Chris de la Motte
de la Motte uses art historical imagery and classical painterly techniques to explore the intersection of the masters’ use of form and colour, merged with his own graphic and synthetic application of acrylic paint. In the first painting in the series, Chasing the Dragon, de la Motte suspends a collage of baroque figures from painters such as Caravaggio, Rubens, Reni and Ricci in modernist no-space, a vacuum where the figures can be appreciated simply as a floating forms. The forms are grounded by a disk of fluorescent pink paint, incorporating a colour that would have been inaccessible and anachronistic to the period of baroque painting. The fluorescent disk serves as more than a modernist, formalist critique of painting like the vacuous space, it is modernism itself entering the picture. The unique interplay of elements: baroque iconography, graphic application, synthetic palette, flat vacuous spaces and fluorescent additions are the foundation of the series, synergized to make the work pop in a way that is recognizably contemporary.
de la Motte believes that interpretations of paintings, figurative or abstract, are unavoidably projections of the viewer's experience. He writes, “Paintings are paintings, just like dogs are dogs, clocks are clocks, cricket bats are cricket bats and should be judged accordingly,” hence the title of the series, IT IS WHAT IT IS. With this approach, de la Motte encourages the viewer to participate. The titles of the paintings are phrases he commonly uses, popular music titles, or slogans related to sales, sports and pubs - intentionally humorous and accessible, juxtaposed with the subject matter of baroque painting, which can be viewed as arcane to the general public.
Born in 1993, de la Motte lives and works in Sydney, Australia. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts, specializing in painting, from The University of Sydney.