Nina, 2006
Boo Ritson has been turning heads in the art world. By quite literally painting on them. Originally trained in sculpture at the Royal College of Art, British born Ritson’s 2005 graduate show revealed her potential through a menagerie of jumbo and miniature sculptures in wood and rubber, packing a playful if somewhat oversized punch back to the pioneering likes of Pop-Art’s Claus Oldenburg.
But it was Boo’s desire to paint, twinned with her former sculptural discipline, that unleashed not only artistic independence but challenged the way in which art is created and perceived, for Ritson’s technique involves brusquely coating her sitters with high gloss emulsion - transforming them into fictional characters that are then photographed and presented as giant colour images.
On the surface, these expressionistic cartoon-like portraits with their vivid colour palettes appear deceptively simple. Deep down, Ritson questions where art exists through inverting the process of creating the art itself. The sitter ceases to function as subject, instead being reduced to the supporting role of canvas whereupon the fictional character is applied. The entire process combines painting, sculpture, performance and photography that doubles as both pseudo-canvas and documented artwork. The object of art is now made the subject of itself and is furthermore caught between the dimensions of time and space, reality and fantasy, never existing solely in one single technique. And so what we’re presented with isn’t necessarily the truth of what was, or what is.
This is perhaps Ritson’s most intriguing exploration to date. It comes at the height of a global obsession with visual identity and the desire to self transform. The true self has become an almost disposable maquette; a figure reduced to a mere canvas on which we may paint an ideal version of ourselves to be projected outwards to an inwardly focused world. Identity is no longer about what we are, but about what we can become. Ritson reflects, "The ‘Cast’ are the people that the people I know could be, if they weren’t the people I know”. This possibility for metamorphosis exists within the gap between inner self and outer exterior, and it’s this gap that Ritson magnifies with her painterly masques; emphasising the character’s facades with glossy veneers that sheen with plastic artifice.
Bellhop, 2007
And the gap continues to widen. Digital networking sites such as the MySpace phenomenon have opened up a realm of possibilities; a realm caught somewhere between the real and the imagined and one to where we may extend ourselves for scrutinised self improvement, or even replace ourselves entirely. And not merely static, but able to interact with millions of other self-improved paradigms within this idealistic plain.
While digital self improvement (DSI) continues to flourish, Ritson is capitalising in the real world. Galleries are displaying her sell-out editions across Europe and in the USA, while collectors are lining up to be transformed by the artist herself. In doing so, perhaps they’re knowingly parodying the digital parallel…
It is oddly reminiscent of a more dignified past, where subjects would sit to be immortalised before a master painter.
Hotdog, 2007
But for these modern day sitters, it is their desire to be everlasting as an alter-ego, caught in the process of the new-fangled rather than for the noble characters they surely already present themselves as. To the great ghosts of past portraiture, this would seem a puzzling idea to say the least. But then mankind has always enjoyed the delights of a dressing up box, probably as much as Yves Klein loved to coat the female form in blue. And while we may critique the transience of surface appearances and the facades of Boo’s ‘Slot-Jockeys’ and ‘Godfathers’, ironically it will be these documented personas that will live on, long after the original has since died away. - Tiffany Tondut