Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Fluorescent Hell




Just yesterday I was marveling here about the fashionable prevalence in European art galleries and even certain art museums of naked fluorescent tubing. No sooner do I open my mouth on the subject than I discover these images from The Petrified Forest, John Miller's recent show at Praz-Delavallade in Paris.

The outsize photorealist paintings are based on stills from reality TV scenes – specifically, scenes in which people have been driven to weep (it is of course taken as a given that all reality TV shares the common goal of forcing the participants to break down and weep, sooner or later).

The banality (not to say sordidness) of the artist's chosen subject is doubly well-realized by the washed-out color palette he correctly selected (to indicate the emptiness of these poorly-staged emotions) and by the bleaching effect of the gruesome strip-lighting.

Thus, the question asked here yesterday about the usefulness of such a cold, killing light-source has now been amply answered.