Seduction of the senses, an essential element in the visual arts, is exploited and manipulated in Mark Webb's latest exhibition. His paintings invite one into grandiose architectural interiors, loaded with the weight of our Great Cultural Heritage. Through these images, Webb emphasises the rhetoric so entrenched in these "public" presentations, together with the inherent power invested there. He uses the illusion of painting, its visual tricks, and the materiality of its surfaces, to attract - and then subvert.
Using a deconstructive critical discourse which hinges upon a conflation of Classicism and Modernism, Webb uses iconic and formal devices to analyse some of the conditions of artistic practice, and in doing so he pursues the postmodernist notion that reality is essentially ephemeral phenomena - open to continual redefinition and reinscription.
Webb employs "structures of identification" - stereotypes such as the Medici statue, classical interiors and façades - that have become spectacles of power. He holds these images up for contemplation, not so much for their glory, as for the ideological connotations attached to them, particularly in relation to the institution of art.
In Dump Webb reveals the equestrian Medici statue alongside Romano's Fall of the Giants; a comment upon the ruin and dissolution of the Classical order which has degenerated into grandiose spectacle. He then conjoins these images with the ascetic forms of Modernism - forms which express the ultimate subject matter, the Idea - and in doing so emphasises the ultimate degeneration of all absolutes.
Direct references are also made to the absurdly terminal modernist vocabulary of Minimalism: Carl Andre's bricks, and many other works in the show reiterate the terminal modernism of Minimalist motifs. The irony is that
Mark Webb, The Dunce, 1988. Courtesy Bellas Gallery, Brisbane.
