There’s a great excerpt of René Magritte’s writing that celebrates the metaphysical work of Giorgio de Chirico. Here is a visual experience, Magritte suggests, “through which the spectator might recognize his own isolation and hear the silence of the world.” It is no grand challenge to recognize a familiar lilting stillness in the works by London-based artist Graham Little, though we might replace “his own isolation” with “hers,” and hers alone. Inspired by Little’s aesthetic commitment to fashion editorials and catwalk reports of the 70s and 80s, the women in his drawings exist in a private world, where they act out the beautiful banalities of life: waiting, sleeping, reading, smoking. Always alone, their delicate Renaissance beauty combined with fuzzy hyperrealism and Modernist interiors lends an eerie surrealism to the work. Through these strange and even ominous vignettes, Little has invented a unique gothic 80s pastoral, with the singular cast of women left in mysteriously abstract yet desirably pregnant solitude.
Paintings by Graham Little
PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 13
TEXT BY EMILY FRIEDMAN
There’s a great excerpt of René Magritte’s writing that celebrates the metaphysical work of Giorgio de Chirico. Here is a visual experience, Magritte suggests, “through which the spectator might recognize his own isolation and hear the silence of the world.” It is no grand challenge to recognize a familiar lilting stillness in the works by London-based artist Graham Little, though we might replace “his own isolation” with “hers,” and hers alone. Inspired by Little’s aesthetic commitment to fashion editorials and catwalk reports of the 70s and 80s, the women in his drawings exist in a private world, where they act out the beautiful banalities of life: waiting, sleeping, reading, smoking. Always alone, their delicate Renaissance beauty combined with fuzzy hyperrealism and Modernist interiors lends an eerie surrealism to the work. Through these strange and even ominous vignettes, Little has invented a unique gothic 80s pastoral, with the singular cast of women left in mysteriously abstract yet desirably pregnant solitude.
Copyright The Artist; Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London; Photography Michael Brzezinski