Bending Over Backwards to Please…

Booth 42

 

 (English)

 

The drive towards precarity, separateness and the obligatory narcissism required for personal branding inform Tony Squance’s “collages” in which he temporarily combines flat figures with landscapes using masking tape.

 

The backgrounds are gestural abstract landscapes, somewhat of the Northern Romantic tradition, which he loosely bases on “sublime” photographs of Instagrammable scenes.

 

The figures are cutouts of drawings taken from photographs of acrobatic poses of wellness and yoga influencers on social media; these are people who literally bend over backwards to please. The drawings are produced absent-mindedly in batches, and then turned around, making them difficult to recognise. Placed on top of the landscape, they float, unmoored.  

 

The production of the figures and of the backgrounds are entirely different processes. The figures are produced with no consideration for the background and vice versa. They are made at different times, as if they were created by two people. The only thing that unites them is the bland Wedgwood blue.

 

These paintings literally embody a world in constant flux: they are never definitively finished and can always be altered on a whim..