亞歷克斯·達·科特

Gio Marconi, Milan

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the green background is lighter and brighter in the original and the colour illustration fails to convey the iridescence of the anodized frame. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. Very close inspection reveals some minor and unobtrusive rubmarks to the extreme outer edges of the plexiglass along the lower edge as well as some light scratches in isolated places to the plexiglass and along the top side edge and corners of the frame. The frame is slightly bowed at the bottom edge.
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“Since 2004, [Alex Da Corte’s] work has been congealing into an accretive discourse on desire that summons the slasher perviness of bogeyman Michael Myers just as it does the painstaking poetics of Robert Gober.”

Annie Godfrey Larmon, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, in: Exh. Cat., Massachusetts, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Alex da Corte: Free Roses, 2016-17, p. 14.

The subject of a major solo exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art during 2016-17, Alex Da Corte has rapidly garnered critical acclaim for his art historically erudite neo-Pop practice. Running the gamut of art history, his work touches upon and directly translates canonical legacies from Nicolas Poussin, through Constantin Brancusi, Joseph Beuys, and Louise Bourgeois, to Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Richard Prince and Mike Kelley as well as more recent contemporary art luminaries such as Ugo Rondinone. Within a lo-fi/low-brow universe of handi-craft, found objects, Pop culture icons, immersive acid colouration, and slick artificiality, high and low form a rhizomatic web that communicates a simulacrum of our contemporary visual experience. To quote art writer and curator Annie Godfrey Larmon, Da Corte’s work reflects “a contemporary field of vision that extends across virtual and physical space, where looking itself is a form of both labour and consumption, and the agendas of neoliberal capitalism creep ever deeper into subjectivity… we have been trained to identify with mass-produced objects and images in a way that allows them to slip ever more easily into – beyond what we covet – what we consider to be a part of us and, once they have appeared on our Twitter or Instagram feed, even something we authored… In this way, Da Corte imitates a visual culture in which reproduction, replication, and forgery are already occurring all the time, throwing mimesis into mise en abyme” (Annie Godfrey Larmon, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, in: Exh. Cat., Massachusetts, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Alex da Corte: Free Roses, 2016-17, p. 14).

Created in 2015, Bandaids with Butterfly is from the artist's series of CD paintings; works created in a similar way to traditional ‘cel’ (celluloid) animation and based on the album cover art of Da Corte's favourite CDs. This particular work is based on the sixth studio album by Mariah Carey entitled Butterfly. Butterfly is considered by many to be a defining album of 1990s Pop as well as a career defining work that Mariah Carey herself calls her ‘magnum opus’. Written on the heels of her divorce from record executive Tommy Matolla, Butterfly sees a different, freer side to Mariah even if it may be just a plaster – or a bandaid – over a broken heart. The beige shapes in this image are taken directly from the album cover – Mariah's left arm holding a butterfly, her nude coloured tube top, and her right arm. It is among the first in the series of CD paintings and the imagery, which loosely references ‘bandaids’ or plasters, also mimics the multiplication or transitioning of biological cells in a petri dish. All of the CD works utilise an enlarged image of an album cover that has been scanned and printed as a flag – a craft familiar to Philadelphia. The works are never cut or collaged but rather stay completely intact while the painted glass acts as a mask in front of the flag, which creates a collaged effect. Significantly, the disembodiment present within Bandaids with Butterfly was made whilst the artist was looking at the Barnes collection of Rousseaus and Matisses in Philadelphia – indeed, the metamorphosis that its collection went through after it was moved, is not dissimilar to the metamorphosis Ms. Carey went through after her break up with Matolla.

Invoking a storied pantheon of artist/musician cover-art collaborations that includes Warhol and The Velvet Underground, Mike Kelley and Sonic Youth, through to George Condo and Kanye West, Da Corte adds to the long-established relationship between art and music. By dramatically enlarging and painstakingly altering original text and image, Da Corte crafts these pieces in a manner that echoes the appropriative processes that are today ingrained within music industry practices, whilst also investing mass manufactured icons with a sense of the handmade. Concurrent with analogous developments in the visual arts during the 1980s, the rise of sampling and the idea of the ‘remix’ radically altered the production and form of contemporary Pop music. However, where the facture and manipulation of these works visually echo the pervasive use of sampling in present day music production, these works simultaneously act as poignant memorials of a bygone era. What has been gained in ease of sonic availability and access via music downloads, has been lost in the visual art of the iconic album cover. Mimicking the square format of a CD case or vinyl sleeve – outmoded forms of music distribution in an age dominated by online streaming – Da Corte mines the nostalgic redolence of music and its obsolete physical cipher. It is worth noting here however that although Da Corte responds to his ‘post-internet’ contemporaries in exploring the effect of the web on visual culture, his work is far more expansive; ultimately Da Corte’s is a practice that occupies its own ecosystem, touching upon and physically conflating all aspects of visual culture.