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| Squirm & Thrive 2015Acrylic on canvas 90x110cm |
CANDY
11 - 28 February 2015
NANA contemporary art space Newcastle
When I walked into
Madeleine’s Islington studio, at the back of her house looking over a garden
(giant jacaranda tree with chooks beyond), Candy reminded me
of a saying: first there was the word, and the word was replaced by
flesh, and it never healed. With flesh, without word, the world becomes
infinite, un-bound by parameters of language.
Madeleine’s fleshy
landscapes are just that, open wounds, no beginning, no ending, rather
suggestions of infinite manifestations, a never ending morphing of worlds.
Internal organs become the landscape, become external, as intestines become
mountains as fertility eggs become reservoirs. Colour is indiscriminate, purple
jacaranda by pastel pink by brown by indigo. At times awkward, calmer as eyes
adjust, what begins as unnatural steers now to a norm and a world where
branches can be yolk.
And what of the things that
live in these landscapes? They oscillate between craving the artificial and
being umbilical-bound to the natural, a mental tug of war to find place and
peace in a world of manufactured candy-like temptations. These temptations
border beauty but before long fall to the realm of the grotesque; an
overindulgence that ends in decay, a melting return to an amoebic state.
With Madeleine’s Candy we
see a peeling back and reduction to the point where reality and what once was
meet: is the world today, was it the Archean.
Ineke Dane
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