"Black Fluffy Clouds: David Hatcher"
2002-06-06 until 2002-07-13
Abel Raum fuer Neue Kunst
Berlin, , DE Germany

In his recent work, New Zealand artist David Hatcher performs an independent analysis of visual representational modes within the social and economic parameters of advanced capitalism. Hand-doodled in ink on paper, the new drawings take the stock market indices of national economies and multinational companies out for an irreverent spin.

The charts mutate into portraits of business leaders, politicians, models and slogans drawn from contemporary western consumer society. As LOreals ambassador of beauty for example, Milla Jovovich is portrayed as the current economic performance index of the LOreal corporation. Abstracting from the cool rationalism of market logic, the drawings probe the aesthetic and psychological qualities of market terrains in the developed world.

In addition to the drawings, Hatcher prints the economic performance charts of the fifteen current member states of the European Union as a series of LSD trips on industry standard blotter paper. The homogenised economic space of contemporary Europe is perceived by the artist quite simply as far out. Seen in conjunction with a work quoting Bretons 2nd surrealist manifesto of 1929, the trips evoke the turn on, tune in, drop out resistant idealism of the late 60s, and suggest a reading of the rest of the drawings as a gesture against the delirius logic and languages of a contemporary multinational establishment.

IMAGE:
David Hatcher
WOW (Milla Jovivich/LOreal), 2002
Ball point pen on Somerset Book

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