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A catalogue to accompany Derrick Guild’s festival exhibition Ever After.
In Ever After he has looked at the most traditional of Joshua Reynold’s orders: portraiture and forced us to interrogate how we look and so what we learn. He takes the miniature, the small oval format, and provides a detail, not a face – against all expectations and in an installation of many of these miniature details our mind tries to reconstruct a whole. He has copied portraits by some of history’s most painterly artists: Velásquez, Raeburn and Lely, but as grids of labels, each bearing a detail, or single labels with a partial of the whole: art imitating art concealing art. But he does not deny his own instinct towards beauty and each work has satisfied the need: delicacy, balance and harmony achieved at an exquisite pitch in each work, however disembodied.
Born in 1963 in Perth, Scotland, Derrick Guild has been the recipient of many awards for his unique work. Guild’s paintings and objects reference European still life of the 15th to 19th centuries. The drama, allegory and naturalism inherent in this period of painting speak to Guild of ever-present dilemmas of the human condition. His works are classical, formal and at the same time contemporary in their sense of dislocation and ambiguity.
‘In my work I am trying to create fluidity between the past and present. I make still life paintings using oil on canvas and objects that use a wide range of materials including cast resin, oil paint and miscellaneous materials. In the paintings, I am trying to harness the look and feel of the great European still life tradition. I want to hijack the high drama and emotional integrity that resonates in the work of that era. I aim to marry that look and feel to contemporary ideas and thoughts that include religion, colonialism, genetic modification, sexuality, commodification of nature, fecundity, humour, appropriation, addiction, beauty, absurdity, surrealism and realism. This list is always growing and is never closed. I feel the still life format easily allows narrative and metaphor, complexity and simplicity to be conveyed. Whilst every painting can be read alone, I feel that they are each a single sentence in a much longer and ongoing dialogue. The objects are in a sense three-dimensional versions of my still life paintings. They have developed from the realisation that an object resonates differently when it interacts in a space as a real object. I am trying for a more heightened sense of realism so that the experience of the object is not filtered through the two-dimensional canvas.’ – Derrick Guild
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