Carlos David
Paintings With a Bite
Paintings with a bite
The Soviets are famous for their bugs – the ones planted at the US Embassy in Moscow received a bit of publicity. But the bugs that the painter Carlos David has crawling over the face of Mikhail Gorbachev aren’t high tech devices used by spies, but insects used to symbolise lies. They are ladybugs, or mariquitas in Spanish. In David’s native Venezuela, a ladybug is a derogatory term for a silly thing. The artist applied the symbolism in his oil painting of Gorbachev to highlight the leader’s ordinariness.
“Everyone sees him as this knight of Peace who has changed the world”, said David in a telephone interview from his home in London. “But all around Gorbachev everything is collapsing”. There is war and poverty. Sooner or later people will see that he’s just a man, like any other man”.
David has had a rare opportunity to see political figures for who they really are…he has grown up learning how closely art and politics are closely linked and his knowledge is quite apparent in his witty, figurative paintings. One painting depicts President Bush minus a forearm. ”I did this to show his shortsightedness”, explains the artist. “ He promised he would have a peaceful nation but soon came the Panama invasion, and now he is ready to start a war in the Gulf”.
David’s work has been referred to as “new figuration” but the motivation dates back to the first political cartoon. He uses images to encapsulate ideologies that are contradictory to each other, so at times his work touches on surrealism, as in the case of the ladybugs. He tells people that the Gorbachev painting ”untitled”, is not finished yet because Gorbachev isn’t finished yet. Such intelligence and humor is hard to come by and has helped David to succeed, even more than his excellent contacts in the art world.
He received his training in London, David attended Barnet College and Chelsea School of Art, where he discovered figurative work was his best means of self-expression, “I didn’t think that by playing with lines and colors I could get the kind of reaction I wanted”, he explains. David has had fifteen shows since completing school. This year he became the youngest artist to do a one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas. In Venezuela he got the reaction he was seeking. Critics described him as a painter of courage who develops his irony by utilizing sarcasm and a fresh, rotund manic humor”. The show at Trinity will introduce his work to an American audience for the first time, and the gallery’s Doug Macon should be congratulated for bringing such talent to Atlanta.
Though his art, David proves that age isn’t a factor in the ability to make profound statements about the world around us. “What saddens me is that after thousands of years the only system we look up to is the system of democracy. It’s the best system we have, but it certainly isn’t perfect”, he says.
What you won’t find in the collection are portraits of women, such as Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who has sparked an outcry over tax reform. But David says if he were to paint her, he would depict her as the Virgin Mary. “She’s just as famous and she’s totally pure in that she believes what she is doing is completely right”, he says. “But we will see how much she is the so-called Iron Lady next year when inflation is shooting up and everyone is on strike”. Whether he’s dealing with iron or irony, this painter knows how to get his message across and is gladly received.
Luanne Saunders.
Creative Loafing. Atlanta October 1990
