Ansel Krut at Jerwood Gallery © Mike Fear
Dark cartoon art
Ansel Krut’s, Verbatim, the latest exhibition at the Jerwood Gallery, will either have you smiling or curious and scratching your head. HOT reporter, Lauris Morgan-Griffiths, found she was doing a bit of both.
On entering the gallery you are confronted with an array of colourful, cartoonesque – some childlike, some grotesques, others playful – humorous, sexual and suggestive images.
Thuggish Houses 2012 © the artist. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art
I spoke to Ansel Krut when he was in Hastings. He told me then that his inspiration came in various ways; snatches of overheard conversation, something he saw that made an impression. Whatever it was that attracted his attention, he would doodle, draw and paint, taking a train of thought for a walk, until something emerged that expressed whatever thoughts and ideas he had been chasing down. And then that would be worked into the final painting.
He volunteers: “Sometimes these paintings are comic, sometimes troubled, sometimes both comic and troubled. It’s as if they all have personalities, histories; as though they have accumulated experiences. They tell their stories through the imagery but also through the visible traces of their making. They report back verbatim on their construction. They are all familiar characters to me – though there are some I’d prefer not to have to sit next to on the bus.”
Krut seems generally quite reticent about explaining the work, and it would have been helpful to be given a bit of a steer. I tell him my first impression is of a lot of eyes staring down at me. He seems surprised. And then responds in that people see very different things in the work. ‘Some people may, for instance, see a cat. There isn’t a cat, but if they see a cat, then that is fine with him.’
Reclining Cigar, 2011 © the artist. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art
He concedes that art is about looking, both from the artist’s point of view and the viewer. And as much as Krut has made his connections to achieve his art, the viewer looks at the work from their own experience and makes their own interpretations.
“All of my paintings are about some sort of confrontation or engagement with the viewer. The character is looking at you, not challenging exactly, but it’s asking you to deal with its strangeness.”
For all its cartoonish aspects there is a dark side and a sexual element to the work. And naught wrong with that. Again, he does not really want to talk about that. But it is undeniable that there are a number of, hidden or suggested, phalli, bosoms and genitalia.
Reclining Cigar is in the shape of male genitalia, Musssels looks like eyes staring out or even female genitalia.
A fig leaf drawn to hide female genitalia is jagged like a holly leaf. But the most disturbing is a child, painted after he had become a father, with her mouth
Ansel Krut, Sonic Boom, 2004 © the artist. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art
open, screaming with jagged piranha-like teeth that look as if they latched onto you, they wouldn’t let go. Butterfly II has two pairs of eyes (seen in the gallery hang at the top of the page) stick balloons as antennae and a phallus thrusts between the bosom-like wings. But then again that could be my take on the painting!
One image, Pruned Roses, seems different. Krut says he simply noticed, liked and painted them. Yet, the branches seem sinister with their evil-looking upturned thorns and are depicted in greyish tones as opposed to the other colourful images.
It seems as if the images are calling out for their stories to be heard.
Arse Flowers in Bloom, 2010 © the artist. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art
Are the thuggish-looking houses a portrait with windows as eyes, doors as mouths; why is a three headed figure seated on a Po? And why is a Groucho Marx-like figure portrayed as a carrot head with a carrot cigar?
According to one of the gallery volunteers, men are amused, women smile and children giggle. Kids seem to delight in the colours and the cartoonishness of the images. They are interested in what it all means – one group of school children renamed Arse in Bloom as bum tree. In this exhibition there is something for everyone to experience as well as to have fun constructing their own stories about the work.
Verbatim continues until 9 July, 2014 at the Jerwood Gallery, Rock-a-Nore Road, TN34 3DW. Opening times: Closed Mondays. Tuesday-Friday 11am-5pm Saturday-Sunday 11am-6pm .
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