Jack Duplock , New Pleasures

S.T.O.R.A.G.E Salon feat. Coopey, Lutz Kinoy, Eldridge, Gioscia, Murdoch, Smith

27 Feb -27 March 2010

The Agency is pleased to present new work by Jack Duplock featuring new mixed media canvases, wallpainting and sculptural elements. New Pleasures is darkly ironic as the work mixes fantasy with realism, infused with a sense of reckless abandon. Duplock uses painting as his departure point and adds to it collage elements and drawings as well as working with areas of blank canvas. The large-scale paintings are richly layered with different levels of graphic, painterly and assemblage techniques.

Duplock's work is lodged somewhere between comic strip graphics, street art and figurative painting, strewn with counterculture icons. His new works continue to deal with the perplexing and strangely affecting subject matters typical for his practice. Hippy birds of paradise mingle in menacing valleys with hammerhorror houses populated with subversive angels, oversexualised wrestlers and skatekids on flames. Duplock's world is that of vintage trashy novels and more generic counterculture figures such as the bikerchick. Almost touching on abjection Duplocks paintings hover on the edge of realism, but also retain a wildly fantastic quality.

His style displays a certain kind of technical ambivalence. The work is heavily strewn with pop culture references, yet dispels this impression with large areas covered with gestural brushstrokes, alternatively with repeated patterns as background. From the outset he also leaves parts of the canvas blank. The voids are not without a certain kind of decorative quality, they appear in the form of rays, which give a central perspective to the scattered collage elements of the work. Occasionally they are round bubbleshapes, sometimes with eyes, sometimes without. They are structural voids and yet they function like a recording device at the same time, as if the canvas is covered with camera lenses observing either the loose narrative of the work itself or the viewer. Or they are gouges, bits of information that are missing or withheld, which emphasise the collage style the artist favours. Duplock does not give answers, yet allows for these omissions or incisions to regulate the structure of his paintings, a technique taken from abstraction.

Ambivalence on a technical level is matched by the subject matter, which spans from an underlying menace to blissfulness, all of which seems to be achieved by a certain point of view, which is produced by a heightened state of awareness. It would be too easy to put this down to a drug induced state on account of the heavy metal and psychedelic source material. It is a dreamlike state, but the stuff of daydreams, which reflect actual reality and moods. Instead of surreal associations, the addition of his proplike sculptural elements presented on subversive altars, remind of everyday shamanistic rituals, the type your teenage son and your biker neighbour would have in common. In Ray of Light (mixed media on canvas, 280 x 160 cm, 2009, pictured) the landscape is one of badly kept housing estates, which form the ghettos of poverty and despair within sprawling cities. The protagonists range from a golden biker jumping over the rainbow to the Seventies blacksploitation chick and flaming skater kids in the barren recreational grounds. Ultimately the subversion in Duplock's work is not in the countercultural reference material, but a search for humanity embedded somewhere in between the onslaught of hedonistic ciphers.

S.T.O.R.A.G.E Salon feat. Coopey, Lutz Kinoy, Eldridge, Gioscia, Murdoch, Smith

Salon, left to right: Sadie Murdoch, Matthew Lutz Kinoy, Giles Eldridge

Salon: Ludovica Gioscia, Beheaded Monarchs