Mark Kent, Cork 1972, was exploiting in huge wall-paintings during the period at the Rijksacademie and his first exhibition at Ellen de Bruijne Projects in 2002, an extreme disintegration of the image. By smashing and cutting his initial image time after time and pasting these pieces again, the spectator could only feel that at first there was a recognisable image involved. But Mark Kents work characterises itself best as a hallucinating cacophony of bits and pieces. For his solo-painting show Kent literally pushed himself back on the canvas. He is still working with the disintegration of the image, but he does not overpower his public so much by confronting them with a whole endless- wall. Now, with his small sharp-edged-canvases and works on paper, he escorts his audience to a place where the familiar order of nature does not count anymore. Watching the work of Mark Kent evokes simultaneous feelings like confusing and seduction in one.
With some adapted quotes from the article of Jan Verwoert on Modernism, Mark Kent tries to describes his underlying motives:
By reconnecting the experimental and transgressive dimension of formalist art with the spirit of sex, drugs and progressive music the work projects an individualized version of a trippy modernism. A key principle of early modernism was its claim for universal validity of its visions for art and society. I try to objectify this historical dogmatism by placing modernism within the realm of personal experience. Is it possible to separate utopianism from ideology and to rediscover programmatic propositions as a way of both making art and as a tool for progressive thinking.
Adaptation of quotes by the artist from: World in Motion, Jan Verwoert on new Modernisms, Frieze 2004
Exhibition: 04/09/04 – 09/10/04
Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS
Rozengracht 207A
1016 LZ Amsterdam
The Netherlands