Crowds Without Qualities
MARCUS KLEINFELD
"One should support the making of opinions" says Marcus Kleinfeld. The paintings collected here require us to recalibrate our understanding of the world as we interpret it.
These are contemplative paintings – both in their subject matter and in our engagement with them. The vividness with which the stuff of our everyday life is presented to us reinvigorates it, names it and identifies it. By rendering the familiar unfamiliar Marcus Kleinfeld reminds us of the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The dramatic portrayals of domesticated foodstuffs serve to reacquaint us with the real by means of close observance.
This is a revelatory contemplation. Engaged again with the world as it is, and not as we have come to think of it, we can take stock again of our attitudes towards our environment as it crowds increasingly aggressively in upon us.
Several of the paintings exhibited here employ, in order to undermine, the loaded typographies, visual conventions and formal techniques employed in what Marcus Kleinfeld describes as the "objectification of the individual" – the increased treatment by contemporary society of the person as a perfunctory unit. The visual shorthand of advertising distracts the individual from what we might term the real – products are idealised and sanitised in order to encourage our consumption of them. Advertising seeks to divorce us from the real - Marcus Kleinfeld seeks to reacquaint us with it.
Only in this reconnection with the world as it is, rather than how it is presented to us by the press, advertising or politicians, can we chisel out the space required to determine freely our own opinions. These are the opinions that Marcus Kleinfeld's work seeks to inspire.
