EXHIBITION

Rise and Fall (2018)
Blake Studios, London
New work by P Mulligan & Anna Salmane
A group show, with new work by P Mulligan and Anna Salmane at Blake Studios, London.


P Mulligan
The Sleepers (2017-18)
Finger paintings (oil) on cartridge or photocopy paper
Images based on photographs taken at Studio 54 (1977-1980)

The Sleepers paintings, are small oil paintings made from documentary photographs taken at Studio 54 in the late 1970s, showing unconscious delirious party-goers sprawled on sofas and floors. The process of displacement to another medium, undoes these, the photographic factual reveals itself as reverie, shifting and partial; using oil paint and no brush, these curious images, disintegrate further through the crude tactile process of finger painting. Insubstantial, they are over-loaded with portent, placed in a tenuous chain of meanings … ideas of capitalist delirium or psychosis … perhaps it is under the weight of this expectation, they cannot hold, they start to disintegrate and dissolve.

The tape used to fix the paper for one painting, becomes the subject matter for the next – pieces of used overlaid discarded tape a stand in for the limp bodies, suggesting the idea, or fact, of destruction in the creative process.

The libidinal charge drives the seeker of pleasure, whether the pleasure is found in the party, the delirium, the painting, or the destruction, or its viewing.