Lot 1: GED QUINN

GED QUINN B.1963 JONESTOWN RADIO signed, titled and dated 2004-5 on the stretcher oil on canvas 185 by 244cm. 72 7/8 by 96 1/8 in.

Bristol, Spike Island, The Heavenly Machine, 2005

Exhibition Catalogue, London, Wilkinson Gallery, Ged Quinn: My Great Unhappiness Gives Me a Right to Your Benevolence, 2007-08, p. 20, no. 8, illustrated in colour

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 2005

Ged Quinn's captivating painting Jonestown Radio is the beautifully-executed archetype of his quintessentially post-modern artistic dialect, and the most significant work by the artist to appear at auction. Simultaneously invoking the grand tradition of Italianate landscape painting and the spirit of cerebral enquiry inherent to Surrealism, Jonestown Radio invites the viewer to interrogate conventional semiotic relationships between that which is implied, signified and represented through arresting visual iconography. Within the setting of a serene and tranquil landscape, which so powerfully and immediately evokes the narrative of European landscape painting and the epic vistas of Claude Lorrain, Quinn has inserted a scene of startling, provocative imagery, whose thoroughly Contemporary associations strike electrifying contrast with its wider context and work as a satirical re-presentation reminiscent of Magritte. Beneath a flimsy, vine-wrapped wooden construction, uncovered but sustained by guy ropes, a weathered wooden armchair sits adorned by a depleted white cushion lying dejectedly on it. This is surrounded by a decrepit platform, covered in the detritus of medicinal brown-glass bottles, small plastic containers, various pharmaceutical wrappers, portable radios and plastic kettles. This splurge of suspicious litter is total anathema to the Arcadian idyll of the surrounding countryside, and presents the polar opposite to the symbolic reassurance and promise of the broad peaceful river meandering through the valley beyond.

Ged Quinn's art invariably inverts automatic preconceptions regarding place, identity, and contextualisation, as well as advancing a post modern heritage of appropriation and re-presentation of supposedly familiar iconographic themes, as explicated by Michael Bracewell: "Quinn's mythology, as he encodes and layers a complex, dense, but art historically meticulous succession of visual and cultural puns and quotations, deep within the resonant, yielding surface of his work, is one in which sly mischief is at work. This mischief in its turn is both teasing and cosmic, aphoristic and sadistic" (Exhibition Catalogue, London, Wilkinson Gallery, Ged Quinn: My Great Unhappiness Gives Me a Right to Your Benevolence, 2007-08, p. 8). However, beyond the deliberate manipulation of familiar visual tropes, Quinn's subjects hold significant and sophisticated thematic content in their own right, as is epitomised in the case Jonestown Radio. While the character of this pharmaceutical picnic is so oxymoronic to the pastoral vista, the decidedly vacant chair is set against the abundant evidence of recent activity, which powerfully emphasises the complete human absence from the scene and creates a surreal atmosphere of vacancy. This dichotomy between presence and absence also evokes the evolution of landscape from the time of Claude and Poussin, whereby the inclusion of figures from Classical myth and Biblical legend elevated the supposedly lowly genre to project a worthy purpose, despite the characters' roles often being nothing greater than attendants to the magnificence of the landscape. Of course, through the Romantic tradition the landscape became subject itself, primarily with the metaphorical conception of nature as a manifestation of the sublime existing beyond quotidian experience. With Jonestown Radio Quinn not only enlists the history of this genre, but also makes it his own by rendering the attributes of Contemporary life in the precise language of the antecedent mode of painting, depicting with great skill and technical mastery the twenty-first century debris. Finally, Quinn's title also invites speculation as to the many underlying themes of the work, and "Jonestown" inevitably reminds us of the town of that name established by Jim Jones in the 1970s in Guyana as home to his cult the People's Temple, and which of course is forever associated with the so-called "revolutionary suicide" of more than 900 people there in 1978. Such profoundly tragic connotation is typical of Quinn's work and this informs Bracewell's conclusion of the greater implications of this artist's exciting output: "Deep within these darkling, dream-like paintings one experiences the unmistakable tension between high romanticism and an entrenched, theological and political alienation. What appears at first sight to be theatrical, declamatory, becomes on closer examination a form of meditation on the confluent histories of science, religion and culture" (Op Cit, p. 10).