the art collectors » Beast Master :: Walton Ford at Paul Kasmin (NY)

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Beast Master :: Walton Ford at Paul Kasmin (NY)

Installation view: The Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London – 3 December 1830, 2009 and An Encounter with Du Chaillu, 2009 (All Images © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors).

Walton Ford creates watercolors that upon first glance, take on the deceiving appearance of hundred year old Audubon natural history paintings. His scenes capture species in acute biological accuracy, but with closer concentration, reveal deeper allegories of the savagery and greed of mankind. What makes Ford’s images all the more compelling, is that none of them are conjured purely from his imagination. Rather, they are based on painstaking research, often drawing upon primary accounts. Steeped in a dense history of colonialism, his paintings tell the true tales of man’s lust for power, imperialistic conquest, and the subsequent consequences of their violent quests for domination. As Ford said in a January 2009 New Yorker profile, “Before Fay Wray comes to Skull Island, King Kong isn’t doing anything. There’s no story until she shows up….”

Borodino, 2009 (All Images © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors).

In Borodino, a pack of ferocious wolves feast over a dead soldier, while bodies lay strewn across the snow covered battlefield of the most violent day of Napoleon’s failed conquest of Russia. An Encounter with Du Chaillu shows a curious gorilla holding a rifle’s twisted barrel to his mouth as he stands over the bare feet of one of the famed French-American explorer’s (Du Chaillu’s expeditions into Equatorial Africa confirmed the existence of gorillas and pygmies) unfortunate guides, who lays dead in the jungle brush below. In The Island, Ford’s pile of viciously canabalistic thylacines alludes to the Tasmanian settlers who hunted the wolf-like beasts into extinction in the 20th century.

Chaumière de Dolmancé, 2009 (All Images © Jeff Newman/TheArtCollectors).

In a slight thematic departure, the pervertedly humorous Chaumière de Dolmancé shows a visibly aroused monkey bound around the neck by rope, perched on a chair amongst questionable photographs and a banquet of food and wine. The scene is a likely reference to an 1868 chance encounter between French writer, Guy de Maupassant and the English poet Algernono Charles Swinburne, who was notorious for his self proclaimed penchant for pornography, homosexuality and bestiality. As the story goes, after rescuing Swineburn from drowning, Maupassant was invited to lunch at his French retreat (named Chaumière de Dolmance after the homosexual character in Sade novel, Philosophy in the Bedroom), where he was exposed to some of the eccentric Englishman’s peculiar tendencies.

Walton Ford – New Work runs through Dec. 23 at Paul Kasmin (New York). Read on for more of our images from the show and a video tour of Walton Ford’s studio.

Filmed at Walton Ford’s Studio in The Berkshires, © Taschen, 2007.