Review

Whispers of Imortality, Natalia Goldin Gallery, Stockholm, 2008

The Chapman Brothers irreverently painted googley-eyed monsters on Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’ etchings; Duchamp butched up the Mona Lisa with a moustache; and Yasumasa Morimura bent the gender of art history’s greatest beauties. In contrast to these interlopers who appropriated art history in order to undermine its icons, Oxford-based artist Sam Branton’s sassy insertion of his own signature characters into history’s archives of decadent art would surely have enthralled and likely aroused his sources. The twenty-three year-old artist incorporates a cast of endearing, deranged and pornographic cartoons into meticulous reproductions of luscious and lusty Baroque, Renaissance and Rococo paintings.

In softly applied and sweetly colored pencil, Branton draws adorable happy faces on the heads of man-sized penises clothed in properly gentlemanly attire and portrays scenes of beautifully dressed genitals playing, fighting and frolicking with an abandon that the Marquis de Sade would envy. The heads of Hubba-Bubba squeeze toys replace gossiping ladies’ lovely faces, or appear shocked at the antics of fellow mythic characters. Summoning up the spirit of Aubrey Beardsley and other great and rare grandiose perverse imaginations, Branton creates his own garden of non-earthly delights.

Sam Branton produces obscure allegories that seem equally informed by a celebration of excesses, as of moral repulsion. In Branton we catch a glimpse of the draughtsman as duplicitous moralist, giving a surprisingly cute face to the vice and corruption of humanity.

In order to paint or sculpt well one must first learn to simply draw. That is the skeleton, the bone structure on which the paint will rest. If the drawing is well planned and executed it can stand alone and serve as the finished product itself just as my friend Sam does, drawing is the cake and paint is just the icing. Much more of the artist is revealed in the way he draws, He reveals himself and hides nothing just as my other dear friend and absolute genius, Jason D’aquino. The meat of it is that in building anything, anything at all, if it can’t be drawn, it can’t be built.

Branton’s drawings are infused with Dadaist influences which conflict wonderfully with the strict style of his drawings. They are somewhat reminiscent of Banksy’s work but retain Branton’s trademark quirkiness. His highly detailed style disguises the strangeness of the scenes for a moment; at first only the heads seem out of place, but then other details seem to appear, such as the intestines in the background of The Dreamer’s Daughter or the caged creature in The Dreamer. After this discovery, the continuity of the images becomes apparent – for example, the creature in The Dreamer is the same one that his daughter is playing with in another drawing. This series is perfectly planned and executed.

In the shadows of moonlet streets, the corners of seedy offices and the darkest nights of cinema’s imagination – what lurks beneath the gritty surface of film noir?

In his first solo exhibition, Erotica Beastia, Sam Branton treats these places as doorways into the erotic underbelly of films and visual stories. Taking noir classics such as Kiss Me Deadly, The Third Man, and Key Largo as the starting points for his drawings, he introduces a cast of cartoon-like characters that mix with and infect the films’ original inhabitants. Set out as a visual storyboard, the films begin to take place in an alien world of humans and hybrids where the characters seem oblivious to their descent into mutation and madness.

Cops become corrupted not just morally but physically, their faces transformed by elephantine phallic distortions to make them look like sex toys in suits. Weird, wonderful, gentle creatures hide in the shadows and, once found, are interviewed, bullied, inspected and dissected by the mob. By combining the psychological grit of film noir with the tender innocence of playthings, the drawings create an unusual sense of disorientation and disquiet, the toys’ naivety enhancing a sense of animal sexuality bubbling under in these corrupted, perverted characters. In the process, the storyboard becomes like a maze into which the viewer has stumbled and now, in too deep, can see no way out of, and even less to hold on to or call “familiar”.

Much like any bacchanalia, it has moments both light and dark. The innocence of the playthings creates touching scenes, such as the umbilical bond of the mutants in suits of “What else have you got left”. Others are humorous in their absurdity, like the deflated aggression of two gangsters that can hardly hold their forms in “Boys, forget the whale”. But throughout, the drawings are shot through with a sexuality that sways from playful perversion to raw carnal desire, captured poignantly in the genital aberrations and insectine faces of the swarm of men in “A hundred nuts and one squirrel”.

In Sam Branton's drawings, normal human character interact casually with strange creatures dressed in dated formal garb, under dreamy circumstance. "Erotica Beastia" is the 24-year-old, Oxford-based artist's debut solo show at London's Sesame Gallery, and Branton presents evocative, soft, shadowy charcoal images of two mutant hitmen, a Bogart look-alike consulting an alien scientist, and a Lauren Bacall-like fox surrounded by fuzzy-faced space-creatures. The scenes are dense with detail, and inspired by Kiss Me Deadly, Key Largo, The Third Man, and other masterpieces of the noir genre.

The drawings' bizarre pull comes from Branton's mixture of appropriated noir imagery with uncanny sci-fi pastiche. Some of his characters have the genre's typical craggy features; others have completely distorted faces that melt into nothingness or morph into swollen testicles, penises, mutant flowers or grotesque heads of Hubba-Bubba squeeze toys, which private dicks with literal dickheads are less a case of black-and-white puerile art than genuine noir. But Branton's skilful draftsmanship enable him to create completely contained, plausible, complex narratives in soft grey or pastel charcoal and pencil that summon up references from film and art history while creating perverse and comic counterpoints. In a previous body of work, Branton incorporated a cast of endearing, deranged, and pornographic cartoons into meticulous reproductions of luscious and lusty Baroque, Renaissance and Rococo paintings. He drew adorable happy faces on the heads of human-sized genitals clothed in proper gentlemanly attire and portrayed scenes of beautifully dressed genitals playing, fighting and frolicking with an abandon that the Marquis de Sade would envy. Though the mood at the Sesame Gallery is more dark than decadent, the alien aspects of Branton's first solo show bring to life the surreal elements of a supremely grounded genre.

Sam Branton’s early works use pencil to invent forms: from the absorption of forms we think we know. What these drawings also inscribe, I think, with the craft of the pencil mark, is exposure to and an understanding of, our current experience of an infinite digital realm. In our world, image surfaces generated through computer graphics tools can be infected or manipulated at the level of the pixel grain. Branton’s works are entirely hand drawn, generated with pencil on paper. In the course of his artistic development has no doubt looked at a vast number of original artworks, and had experience from direct observation of the human form, but there is something interesting about the quality of the marks he makes that speak of the act of drawing from reproduction.

Colored pencil works are rendered directly onto the paper. He says he doesn’t do initial sketches, so he must have an acute sense of mapping out the space of a page. One can see the faint initial lines, occasionally: long contours marking heads and bodies, upon which the light short, feathery shading begins to be hung. Each smaller mark appears like a stretched and hairy pixel, building up and overflowing in an excess of soft flesh-growth: around tentacles, googly eyes, boobs and giant schlongs. Branton’s lexicon of creatures speaks of a digital diet - as classical western art merges with cartoons evoking Steamboat Willy and Betty Boop of the 20s and 30s, morphing with 70s sexploitation maybe, and Japanese anime of the 80s to the present.

When we research images now, more frequently than not, it is via the Internet. These vary in qualities of reproduction. From lighting, resolution, cropping, to digital collage: An 18th Century portrait can be downloaded, stitched with an alligator head, up-loaded again in a matter of hours, by many a young adolescent with a computer in their bedroom. Even just downloading and uploading can vary the way the image is seen. But what does it mean to redraw such pictures, and invent new forms within the pictures in the process? What does it mean to draw from reproductions? Or, as Branton has sometimes done - to draw “free hand”, having practiced in a combination of these processes?

His later works (involving similar creatures, inhabiting Film Noir stills) enter a new convolution of this world of the digital ‘mass ornament’. The black white and greys from the charcoal seem to allow the viewer to search for unintentional ghosts, as well as the intentionally drawn monsters. When we pause a video on youtube, for example, what is it we really see? What is it we really have been looking at? Between the film version and the computer, or a DVD (or a VHS if we choose to be retro), are a myriad of extractions and compressions of light and shade. To re-render the filmic image in analogue (charcoal on paper) is a strange kind of form-invention: a bit like a Bollywood painted sign - where there is some sort of uncanny balance between gestural mark and the suppression of marks in smooth rendering, which gives the final image an arresting difference.

Could any of this be because of our strange relationship to time? The time taken for one frame of film to pass; the time it took to prepare for that still to be captured; the time taken for a video to "buffer" on the web; the time taken to remake/redraw a film still, with crumbly burnt wood on mass produced, compressed paper pulp.
Branton ’s creatures, like cultures of bacteria on a cube of agar, continue to grow in this time, grow with these changes, and leave traces of themselves hanging in his images. Their silver slug-like trails remain intriguing to follow.