Lot 7: Ged Quinn (b. 1963)

Ged Quinn (b. 1963)
Gone to Yours
oil on linen
72 x 98 3/8in. (183 x 250cm.)
Painted in 2005

London, Wilkinson Gallery, Ged Quinn, 2005.

Wilkinson Gallery, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005.

'[Claude Lorrain was] the most perfect landscape painter the world ever sawall is lovely - all amiable - all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart'.

(J. Constable quoted in R.B. Beckett, John Constable's Discourses; compiled and annotated, Ipswich, 1970, pp. 52-53).

Executed in 2005, Gone to Yours is a meticulously executed and beautifully rendered romantic landscape painting which has been turned on its head. Revisiting the tradition of European 17th century landscape painting, Ged Quinn subverts the original associations of Claude Lorrain's Landscape with Dancers of 1669, to create a strangely dystopic panorama, diverting the viewer from its depicted bliss and invoking instead the darker sides of humanity.

In Quinn's appropriation of the image, he faithfully reproduces the composition, but substitutes Claude's buoyant pastoral dancers with a rustic structure evocative of a bed or shrine. This squatter's site in the foreground alludes to Ray Bradbury's 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, in which an American society, living sometime in the future, is prohibited from critical thought through reading. The masses turn hedonistic, and those who resist become marginalised. Neatly arranged on top and above the shrine are other incongruous details such as a set of carefully folded camouflage fatigues, a collection of voodoo dolls, a crucifix and a pair of candles as if prepared for some sort of pagan ritual. Polished neatly in front of the structure is a pair of Doctor Martin laced boots that recall the anonymous Zodiac Killer on the rampage in California during the 'summer of love' of 1967.

Whilst there is a certain satisfaction to resolving the cultural etymology of Quinn's painting, Gone to Yours goes beyond this neat conclusion. Whilst he obviously enjoys Claude's painting, transposing the original work with technical reverence and admiration, Quinn also offers an indictment of the idealism it embodies. Deliberately upsetting the harmony of the vista, Gone to Yours provides a comment on the often-encoded political and theological associations within Romanticism. It is a striking and disturbing union of the now seemingly nave optimism of the past and the wider realities of the present.