RICHARD COLEMAN - MARYLAND.USA
1 OCTOBER 2009
Written by
ANNABEL FENN
Richard Coleman’s paintings are inhabited by a cast of
unlikely associates; lions, shady pin-striped sickly
pallored men and melancholic women. All appear trapped in a
sparse, unforgiving purgatory where wish fulfillment lies
beyond a silent border. So what else is there to do but be
bad? It gets a bit iffy as a butt-naked, exotic beauty with
an up-to-no-good look in her eye plans undrawables, and a
bat-boy in a similar state of undress hovers above an
unlikely pianist with that same shifty gaze. So what
the shit’s going on? And hey, wait a minute.. what if those
aren’t really polar bears? What if they are alligators
in polar bear suits? They are way too sinister to be
lounging around like reptiles basking in the glory of rainbow
coloured gauche and ink vomit. Plus you have to wonder,
who’s doing the swallowing and who is being swallowed as an
otherwise benign background becomes more noxious the longer
you eyeball it…
33 year old
Coleman is an obsessive patterner, doodler and old-skool
graffitier who ferries between L.A. and San Francisco; the
gay-pride flag quietly slip into his compositions and out
the decapitated torso of a man-handled lion being
slaughtered, Christ-like, in a bid to collect it’s magical
juices. Influenced by Florentine frescos and religious
imagery of yonder, the Coptic gold halos add to the urge to
kneel and prey at Coleman’s symmetrical alter whose mystical
imagery alludes to medieval tales of knights, fallen virgins
and anachronistic all-seeing pyramidal graves. The fact
that he keeps his pencil sketches in his recent final works
adds another layer of meaning to the paintings. The
calcified fetuses are evidence of an idea that didn’t quite work out and
become silent spectators of a world more colourful than
their own.
Coleman weaves his
symbolic characters into a variety of think-scapes, where,
like words themselves they change their meaning depending upon
the context and other characters surrounding them.
Hot-blooded, sexually ferocious bears tussel with hooded
grim reapers and in the tradition of any good Miss Marple
episode, we never can be sure who’s the good guy and who’s
the baddie. When Mr Ben cuts out the pies, joins a René
Magritte biker gang and falls into a quilted bedspread
stitched by Mary Poppins, Coleman can give up his day-job.
But until then his masked mafia men will have to remain
fixed in his creepy
Renaissance-style
portraiture and cannibalistic landscapes.
http://www.richardcolmanart.com/
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