2008 DARREN SYLVESTER

EXHIBITION IMAGES

Once upon a time, Darren Sylvester was dubbed ‘The King Of Sharp’, a natty nickname given in reverence to his photographic work’s tendency towards ridiculously in-focus focus. The latest collection of work for Sylvester finds the Melbourne artist, at times, straying far from this benicknamed identity, although the handle still might stick; the ‘Sharp’ in question the array of tools used to hand-carve a pair of large wooden facemasks.

With their gaping maws frozen in contorted terror, the horrific, twisted visages seem to be screaming; to look into the empty eyes of these wailing wraiths is to stare into the hollowed-out face of death itself. True enough, these wooded works were inspired by a different kind of facemask: those from the realm applied beauty products; an insatiable industry which, coincidentally enough, similarly prays upon on the upright mammal’s perpetual fear of death and dying.

Sylvester’s displayed facemasks bear the odd, fragmented names of various branded skin-care facial applications: Sofina Whitening Memory White, Misscoria Crystal Collagen. Whilst it might seem an act of impish incongruousness to affix such lab-tested stickers to hand-carved, old-world, tribalist artefacts this is not just mere pillory of the silly, sinuous shapes of the masks peddled by Procter & Gamble, Otsuka Pharmaceutical, et al.

Sylvester has carved each face mask in the shape of the product whose name it bears. By appropriating the market/clinically researched, carefully sculpted names and shapes used to sell chemical creams like so much snake oil, Sylvester is calling out the industry’s claims on bathroom voodoo: phrases like ‘regenerative skincells’ and ‘age-defying properties’ incantations of so much shamanist witchdoctory.

Sylvester, himself a first-world entrepreneur, has, like corporate al/chemists, sought out his source materials from less-privileged foreign countries, brokering their devalued/industrialised product in the loan-sharkesque IMF-pimped global market, his used dead-tree remnants hauled in from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brazil.

By doing so, Sylvester speaks not simply of the bartering of the rag-tag marketplace at the centre of the global village, but of the citizens dwelling therein; the world’s human-beings living in the shrinking unreality of an existence in which all cultures’re becoming singular.

The quest for youthful-looking skin, once the pursuit of blue-blooded European aristocrats, is now the province of all citizenry. The same aspirations are on sale, everywhere, to everyone. Any differences from such consumerist norms are best kept behind a mask; a façade shielding individuality beneath society’s outwardly propagated, monomaniacal beauty-myth.

With I Care For You, Sylvester explores this idea further. With its blocked-out squares of authentic Clinique colour, Sylvester parades the softened tones used to highlight faces kept frighteningly, inhumanly youthful by the application of smooth, sculpted masks.

Yet, such paintings aren’t simply blown-up make-up swatches. Rather, the iconic Clinique palette is truly a totem. Psycho-geopolitics be damned; new-millennial identity need not be defined by the ancient primary colours of your nation’s flag, but simply by the muted hues you choose to accentuate your mask.

Critical readings of Sylvester’s work have often returned, recurringly, to the notion of the artist using and abusing the photographic currency of advertising, of speaking in that ultimate visual language of the 21st-century. Yet, looking at an image like Who Are You or How I Meet You, I Don’t Know, where a doctor is lit up, in yellow tungsten light, like the figure of a glowing devotional painting, what Sylvester is ‘selling’ here doesn’t seem to be simply some ironic inversion of such sales-job culture. Its title suggests that we’re gazing up, in near-religious reverence, at the ultimate modern man: leader, rescuer, success (ka-ching!). Someone a the head of the occupational food-chain. The apex homosapian. In short: the marrying kind. Only, cruelly, a girl may have to end up on her deathbed to meet such a catch.

Viewing such imagery —displaying Sylvester’s seemingly unending desire for control, clarity, and commonality— as being but commentary on the idioms of advertising is so much critical reductionism. Such a reading seems to speak not of Sylvester’s own aesthetic, but of his predisposition towards placing branded images in his photographs; suggesting that people, despite dwelling in a world-existent-ad-space, still draw big, bold, theoretical lines between supposed forms of ‘commercial’ and ‘art’ photography.

Don’t Substitute A Life To Satisfy Mine is the only piece in the artist’s latest collection to use such, but such use is in keeping with the ongoing tendencies of Sylvester’s work. Products are often placed at the centre of suburban struggles; dishrag dramas in which, say, a box of Cheerios becomes a character unto itself. Sylvester borrows from the characteristics brand-names begin to embody as they’re perpetuated in perpetuity, speaks of how name, colour, and logo take on particular qualities; the incorporated entity, already given the legal privileges of the individual, growing into an individual’s character-traits.

Ever one for evocative titles, with Don’t Substitute A Life To Satisfy Mine, Sylvester lyrically evokes the scourge of time. Not merely that – as Gaspar Noé, leader of cinema’s New French Extremity, so delightfully coined – “time destroys everything”, but that man knows that is his destiny. Continuing to live whilst aware of the inevitable annihilation is the paradox of the naked ape’s existence; this cognitive awareness, not to mention deep understanding, of the forthcoming future creating an unnatural, uneasy kind of cultural precognition.

Time Has Life’s Meaning is this in extremis. In it, a pair of wholesome, horizontally-striped, denim-clad teens climb into a photobooth; a seemingly spontaneous lark lacking any spontaneity, an apparently hilarious exercise that is never that. For, not only are these youthful protagonists in search of physical photographs – in which a frozen image is captured for snapshot’d posterity – but they are doing so with a sobering awareness that time will never weary, that the years to come shall forever run like rabbits.

The subjects’ decision to enter the photobooth is not simply some vainglorious human desire for immortality —that same yearning that fuels the sale of ‘age-defying’ facial masks— but an unstated awareness that this moment needs to be captured. Both subjects know that they will get old. And both know, deep in the hearts,that their young friendship will, like so many dying skin-cells, inevitably be lost to the ravaging winds of time.

Anthony Carew