Words, story.
SAXON QUINN,
THERE
IS A CODED LANGUAGE FOR
COMMUNICATING WITH THOSE UP ABOVE,
passing aircrafts.
N = NO, Y = YES, ⟎ = NEED MAP AND COMPASS; LL = ALL IS WELL, seems like a lot of trouble to say everything’s fine.
Saxon Quinn’s canvases were dropsheets for his last paintings. They’ve been stepped on, walked all over; weathered by the load of ambition. Transporting the mess of another’s expression, back and forth, bull hauling restless pig, the creative unconscious. In other words, stained in full spectrum color, mistakes and missteps sprayed like a forensic blood spatter analysis of the alive and kicking, the canvas has received the life treatment.
Supposedly Jasper Johns was only interested in dealing with maps, numbers, the American flag. Things that are seen but not looked at. Facts in plain sight, parked in unmarked vans. If you ever find yourself in the middle of nowhere, a James Turrell installation is probably nearby. Turrell cuts a hole in the roof illuminates the edges and without metaphor, gives you a window to the sky. Now, the hole is new but the big blue isn’t. Perhaps, if you want to see the light, and it’s an awful sickly evangelist-flavour in the mouth to say it, but, perhaps, it does matter what you’re framing your little slice of heaven with.
Quinn puts you with an attentive bunch of freaks, ghouls, skulls with Hollywood smiles, satanic dogs, and thee most kissable heart-shaped lips, lonely on a face with nothing else. You’re looking at the bathroom wall of an assortment psyches. Looks like fifty now but they were one once, a 5 x 2 meter whole. “I chose you Liam Payne” “FREE BRITNEY. FREE PALESTINE.” “IGGY IS GOD” “JESUS WOULDN’T DO COKE IN THE BATHROOM”. They’re fighting, fucking, laughing. Its ugly, chaotic and kinda sweet. Funny mirrors floor to ceiling and every one of them: you.
Portraits of the artist, portraits of you. Expressing one or a bundle of twenty-seven (industry-approved) emotions. Mad, happy, sad, how the spoon found the mouth is yours and yours only, but once it's in: tastes all the same . It melts in your mind, not in your mouth. When people walk away, I want them to feel something, Quinn says. Before we had feelings, there were “accidents of the soul,” “passions,” and “moral sentiments”.
The drawings of a child! Lunatic! COMMUNISTS! was what people said seeing CoBrA, the European art movement Saxon Quinn paintings pay respect to. Death is a painting not a sculpture because we only see it from one side. Maybe this comes as a surprise to some. You’ve already died, and more than a couple times. This you and that you. It melts in your mind not in your mouth.
Children suck at gambling, they’re tipping and swaying, showing you their cards like its last-call-o’clock aboard the Casino Queen. No poker face. A royal flush of thoughts, feelings and emotions. Then we see their paintings and we’re transfixed, studying them, hoping for any insight into their still-loading-little minds. Children make the mysterious simple and the simple mysterious. So we’re looking, leaning back on the chair to peep the paper on the right: looking for answers. Twisting nozzles on the radio, searching for the frequency, to hear those sounds again. Those old accidents of the soul.
Seeing those eyes of yours, almond just like hers, your Mothers not accusing you of robbing her blind. There’s no black market for family genes, just like there’s no bootleg sadness no counterfeit contempt. They get carved in, along with all the other gems and junk stickerbombed and tagged on a shared wall. Paint over. Begin again. Born. Died. You may be wonderful but you’re nothing special.
THERE IS A CODED LANGUAGE FOR COMMUNICATING WITH THOSE UP ABOVE.