Rachel Riley and Robert Johnson (2021) Schilderij door Tom Aberneithie

‘Rachel Riley and Robert Johnson’. Second in a series of four paintings where I take an English woman, known for her beauty and cross her with a respected American blues musician. I’m really interested in the contrast this comparison brings between characters almost a century apart:
meaninglessness/meaning; visual beauty/sonic beauty; youth/age; new/old; woman/man; white/black; UK/USA; early capitalist age/late capitalist age; financially secure/impoverished; happy/sad; static/moving, privilege/oppression; lust/love; superficiality of image/human condition; detached spectatorship/engagement and involvement.
Of course both characters share the theme of entertainment. In this time of late capitalism when we are exhausted by an omnipresent cultural sterility, maintaining ourselves as entertained slaves seems to be all there is left. I therefore think this juxtaposition is rather apt. Both characters in this painting, though polarised in nearly every way (as described), today, are both merely exploited caricatures of equal significance/insignificance.
Once we had beliefs, now we only have aesthetics. Beliefs have become an aesthetic. What was once sublime is now a stereotype. And the whole vacuous package is drip fed to us via screens which we are desperate to consume and then waste because our definition of ‘value’ has now changed to a mere price tag- a tag we scrutinize in order to determine our worth as people. But we know all this already. That’s the problem- we know it but accept it. I know that this painting, my Instagram page, the promotion of my art and of myself will only ever be (at best) a cartoon of anti-capitalist rhetoric. And that at its most effective, it will strengthen the system it is so critical of. But what succeeds post irony? History is over but we think and we feel and we paint nonetheless.