Root Cartwright

detail of Homage (Warhol's Brides Stripped Bare)—

» Repetition: a typology of the banal or the rhythm of a methodical but fruitless unmasking: revelation entailing inevitable concealment. Cans like flayed and emptied vanitas skulls, silently eloquent of the void, the question of content deferred, a homage not to the artist but to the material world the artist modifies but cannot escape.«

Root Cartwright’s work is mainly based on photography in a wider sense. His Homage (Warhol’s Brides Stripped Bare) is from a body of work examining the relationship between the photographic object and the object photographed. It shows Warhol’s Campell soup cans without the label, questioning the image as means of representation.

Cartwright emphasises the distortion that occurs when an image is used to represent the ‘real thing’. Furthermore he wants to point out the aesthetic value of the can as an object, refering to this piece as ‘a sort of typological still life, with industrially produced objects replacing the fine glass and silver vessels featured in classic Dutch or Spanish still life paintings.’

Due to the repetition in this work, the originality is more and more distanced, even though the can remains a can, its significance has changed: from being an object, to becoming an image on Warhol’s painting, to the photograph on Cartwrights work. Homage is a stripped reproduction of a reproduction of a mass produced object.

@ Artist's Website

»»»

.-°-.