Chronicle | Aaron Perkins
6 - 27 April, 2019
For emerging artist, Aaron Perkins, the genre of history painting is of profound interest to the contemporary era. While prestigious institutions throughout the world hold grand paintings historicising Renaissance battles, Revolutionary wars and Imperial metaphors, Perkins’ is driven to understand a way in which one can capture the historical present. With an omnipresent awareness of our global connectedness, the present moment can feel as endlessly fragmented as it does hopelessly fast. No longer is there any illusion of a grand historical narrative, and as such, Perkins’ work aims to consider the way history painting can capture a multitude of voices.
To develop contemporary history painting beyond the traditional framework, Perkins references the literary genre of ‘autofiction,’ in which the author uses a protagonist, who is written in the first person and in some way, represents the character of the author themselves. Comprised of both autobiographical and fictitious narratives woven together, autofiction seeks to critique the inability of singular accounts to constitute a true historical narrative. Through these inconsistent autofictitous narratives, there is often a sense of plotlessness– an idea which Perkins explores in these works.
The works in Chronicle combines two distinct elements– online news articles containing photojournalistic images, and cryptic crosswords. Both of these forms published in either print or online news sites daily, work as reportage of contemporary events and culture. By loosely drawing photojournalistic images, Perkins simplification of line removes any ability to robustly gauge the image depicted, without knowledge of the original image. Thus, the viewer must engage their own subjective consciousness to consider the narrative at play. Overlaid with these images are the solutions to cryptic crosswords Perkins solves directly on the canvas, taken from the same day as the images. As the words are scrawled hastily and often crossed out, the viewer is drawn between reading and viewing the artwork. The use of the cryptic crossword serves as a somewhat distilled form of contemporary news and culture, which Perkins considers as an abstraction of broader editorial statements.
By combining these two elements, Perkins work conveys the incompleteness of any historical narrative that the artist attempts to set or the viewer attempts to reconstruct. However, despite these limitations, the work paradoxically becomes part of the historical record of a given day, capturing the fragmented and incompleteness in the 21st Century.