Guillotine!

Guillotine is three suites of paintings all concerned with depiction, the portrait, and objective reality. The works are uniformly ridiculous in terms of technique, rather than masterful, but traditional mastery and conservative tastes are at the butt of these jokes. Its all dry - Dry as a Weet-Bix sandwiched in a Patrick White novel.

There are different degrees of self consciousness to the different sets of works. One suite sees the christian motif of La Pieta reconstituted into a realm of student binge drinking and transitional objects.

The next is about the progression of an artist to reach their "peak artistic maturity", whatever that means. Dates, places and identities are short circuited. While Self-portraiture implies a link between interior life, countenance and the act of painting, these paintings lead nowhere: they are deadpan and reveal nothing at all of inner life. I will only give the information necessary: that of the right-angle dispositif in painting.

Rob O’Connor 2019