Commentary
We are all haunted. This is the premise of the provocative paintings of Giedre Montvila. We are haunted by a race of beautiful, decadent beings who, unbidden, constantly appear in our consciousness. These fabulous creatures exert a fascination and unacknowledged control over our lives that belie their ephemeral existence.
These phantoms are the models, movie stars, and other celebrities who perpetually appear on television and in the pages of glossy magazines. Their images provide a visual vocabulary for this culture's unspoken dreams. And they are the raw material of Gierdre Montvila's paintings. She culls printed images and then exquisitely renders them in colored pencil. With these drawings, Montvila creates a temporary collage that often has heads or bodies appearing through torn layers of tisuue paper. The motif of masking and exposure recurs throughout this whole series of work. The artist's final step is then to depict the collaged drawings in a painting in oil on linen.
Montvila's tromp l'oiel paintings fool both the eye and the imagination. The fragmentary images are painted with a nearly photographic attention to detail. A favored strategy is to array the seemingly torn pictures in a kind of bulletin board/ shrine. The vignettes, exposed by rips in the translucent paper, are often collectively framed by a rough rectangle that mimics a photographer's black grease pencil, used to mark a contact sheet.
Montvila's intention is to both seduce and to critique. The seduction is the piling up of fetching faces, hard bodies, and suggestive poses. There is nothing here that cannot be found in the mass market magazines whose fashion and cosmetic advertising is a constantly updated catalogue of over-the-top fantasies. Lurid and blatant, these images promise a new world of glamour and sensual gratification with each turn of the page.
Montvila's critique is to isolate the images which haunt us, which make us compare ourselves to surgically and digitally perfected examples of the young and the sexy. Her critique is to remind us that the media is a powerful dream machine and we are its willing subjects, still struggling to wake up.
– John Mendelsohn |
