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Gareth Lloyd:
Towards an Aesthetic of Dissent
María Esther Maciel
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
The now has converted into the topos of contemporary sensibility.
Not a closed now where past and future are elided, but a moveable
point of temporary intersections. Where the memory of the world
is inscribed and erased. Where the senses migrate to the until
then unexplored zones of the body. Where the margins and the
center become a non-place. A space of small things, of detritus,
of desires for impermanence. A time of cultural intersections.
Consumption and waste.
If, within this perspective, utopian promises no longer trace
the paths of the present, and the future cultivated by the historical
movements of the avant-garde no longer occupies the center of
the temporal triad, it is left to each artist to create his own
way of looking, and with it to invent his own now. As Paul Auster
says, seeing is a way of being in the world. And we might add:
of leaving the world, to then find it again in a state of otherness.
Gareth Lloyd invents his now from a gaze in transit. A gaze that
not only sees, but critically reads the time (historical and
personal) in which the artist is inserted, and extracts from
this experience a new horizon for his vision. In other words,
the mobile nature of his work is justified by the attempt not
only to capture, through images, some visual signs of the last
three decades, but also to reconstruct a personal trajectory:
one which he himself as an artist has sought throughout this
period, in his intense but non-complacent dialogue with Pop Art,
media iconography, and the aesthetic legacy of the modernist
tradition. Through this experience he has known how to convert
the look into a movement of traversing the limits of time and
space, in search of a viable alternative sensibility for the
present.
One may say that the way in which he undertakes this search is
by putting on the surface of his pictures, in conjunction and
disjunction at the same time, various modes of handling the question
of image in the contemporary culture of the turn of the century.
For this purpose, he makes use both of icons produced by the
mass media and of some metaphors that modern poetry (more specifically
those of Mallarmé) has left us. And he adds to this his
own aesthetic proposal, which is simultaneously the sum and subtraction
of the two other approaches. He manages to construct from this
game of paradoxes a kind of visual narrative, through which he
tells-in oblique ways-the story of the process of creation.
 Perhaps the best way of showing
how this narrative is constructed is beginning with one of the
works in this catalogue, entitled "Two Icons from the Seventies."
In it are found two fragments of two representative icons of
the political/cultural clash between capitalism and communism
during the Cold War. On one side, the supposed back of Clint
Eastwood, one of Hollywood's myths; on the other, the arm of
one of Mao's soldiers. Between the back and the arm, there is
a strange symmetry, as if these parts completed one another in
some way. And yet, there is a fissure, a gap between them. We
might say that what separates them is also a kind of distance
that unites them. Above these images, two others with no figure,
almost empty, are placed, as if they were blank pages from a
notebook or paper, for a drawing that does not yet exist. The
background of the picture is dark, stained with chalk and water.
Without a doubt, the ingenious articulation of the two icons
of the Seventies (both converted into stereotypes of a given
moment of world history) point critically to an aesthetic mode
of representation based on the ideas of identification and consumption.
That is, a mode of representation which has its aesthetic appeal
in the iconic image, canonized by the media of mass culture.
And when I say critically, it is by thinking of the form in which
this articulation occurs in this work, since the figures are
not presented directly but metonymically, through fragments,
as if when the artist does present them, he has already put them
in a state of precariousness, of erosion.
On the other hand, the presence of disinhabited and denuded images
suggests another possible path of representation: that which
is sustained by Mallarmé's idea of silence, of the abyss,
of the blank page/canvas, in short, of non-representation. Yet,
a more attentive look can perceive that the surface is not so
white, for it contains light touches, diluted spots, yellow pigments;
and that the silence is traversed by small, nearly imperceptible
noises. They seem to tell us of the impossibility of attaining
absolute silence or nothingness, showing that purity is an illusion.
In this sense, the artist also makes a critical reading of the
aesthetic project of a certain current of modern art and literature:
that which is sustained by the negation/destruction of reality
and language itself, in search of something beyond the materiality
of the form.
It is important to note that these two forms are not presented
as opposite or mutually exclusive. They are superimposed, joined,
making one relative to the other. In the simultaneous convergence
or divergence between them, a new space and a new time are created
for the image. Through the paradoxical game they engender, the
artist seeks an alternative form for his own sensibility.
 If this alternative form in the
work in question still appears as a state of search, one may
say that it will appear in a more explicit form in other works
of his, as, for example, in the picture entitled "Slight
Adolescent Girl". Here the icon is implicit (the traditional
figure of the Madonna and child) and makes itself seen at first
in the image from a package of soap-powder (put on the surface
and stained with pigment). On the right appears a kind of blank,
the slightly pigmented emptiness of an almost empty page. In
the middle, another image already appears, merely sketched on
a surface that is also stained, traversed by dilutions, containing
an inconclusive, ill-defined drawing of an adolescent girl. The
lines of the figure are tenuous and dispersed. In it, the figure
loses its compactness and weight.
The limits established between the three images bring them together
in the same proportion as they distance them (as in "Two
Icons of the 70s"). These images are also placed in a background
with no homogeneity. The one in the middle, in which the two
others are condensed and dispersed, represents the way of access
to a new approach to the seeing (mediatized on the left by the
consumerist appeal and on the right by the completely silenced
appeal). This approach, which refuses the stereotype without
destroying it, is the alternative that the artist offers for
his time. "De-doxify" our cultural representations,
without the destructive gesture that defined the so-called "tradition
of rupture" is Gareth Lloyd's movement. He seeks to extract
a modest figurativeness from the lightness and incompleteness
of the line, without compression, without visual saturation,
at the same time that he places this figurativeness in a dialogical
relation with other models of representation of our culture.
To achieve this form, the artist traverses different moments
in his creative process. If we distribute all his works along
a diachronic line, by following the thread of this process we
encounter what was called at the beginning of this text a visual
narrative. In this narrative, we first encounter the works aimed
at a direct confrontation with the figurative mode, proper to
mass culture, which finds in Hollywood cinema its best expression.
This confrontation appears as a challenge: how to critically
deal with the logic of consumption that structures the representation
of images in the contemporary world? Through the modernist path
of rupture and aesthetic autonomy? Through the idealized path
of abstraction? Aware that the modernist response to this conflict
no longer suits the critical demands of the present, the artist
chooses another path: that of erasure, of dilution. From this
choice arise other works like "Icon," in which part
of a photograph of a Humphrey Bogart type appears blotted out
by another ground, in a movement of foregrounding the background.
Little by little, the space of erasure (generally represented
by the brightness of a intense yellow, such as in the picture
"The Desert and Perspective") will expand in other
works and completely obliterate the consumption and identification
mode. At this point, the artist stages his own exile in the space
of the uninhabited images and begins to explore the signs of
expansion: the desert and the sea. Within this field, other associated
images come in: sand, night, rain, and wind. They come in various
works to show the ambiguity of edges, limits, given the near
impossibility of making precise the point where these elements
come together and draw apart.  One
may say as well that in the works of this series an implicit
complicity with the idea of loss is found. An elegiac but unsentimental
atmosphere makes itself felt in some of them. This is the case,
for example, in "The Death of a Stereotype," where
the image of a masculine figure (Richard Burton) appears partially
diluted in black, on the dark surface of the background, beside
a section of bitumen, simulating the gloss of film. Disappearance,
solitude.
The escape from exile is made by crossing the desert, a humble
crossing: clandestinely, on the back  of
a donkey, in the morning rain. On the sand, the flower, the footsteps
of an elephant, the features of adolescence, (transition) the
lion. A new form insinuates itself, leading both back to earlier
works like "Zephyr" and "Ellipse", and to
a passage ahead of itself. The work "Leaving the Twentieth
Century" is the creative response to this movement. It shows
us how the artist, on leaving the century/desert, finds a new
outlet for his own language and begins to take an alternative
form from the contiguity of the prosaic and the backgrounded:
girls/rain, toys/shadow, animals/blurs. Objects sketched as incomplete
figures, drawn out of the layers of the as yet unseen appear,
whose function is not so much to represent, but to suggest.
If, as Italo Calvino would say, we live in a culture in which
the all-powerful media can do nothing but "transform the
world into images, multiplying it in a phantasmagoria of mirror-games
images that are mostly destitute of the internal need that
should characterize every image," it is left to the sensibility
of artists like Gareth Lloyd to invent new forms of the visual
apprehension of the present and extract from them an aesthetics
of dissent.
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