modernlover2000

[modernlover2000]

Bio

Ivan Burdon (b. 2000) is a multidisciplinary artist and actor from Hackney, East London. Best known for starring in double BAFTA winning Netflix show 'Top Boy' as 'Bradders'.

He won The Dean's Award during the 2024 CCI Summer Festival for his body of work titled: 'Post-Artificial Realism' and continues to work with avant-garde philosophic themes that regard modern life and culture.

[modernlover2000]

Artist's Statement

My practice is creative activity. It fulfills the capabilities afforded to me by my consumption.

This activity affords me a realisation of my becoming, which is metabolic.

Creation and becoming vitalise each other as products of complexity, the eschatonic force of individualisation as echoed by our linguistic categorisation. This produces a navigable multiplicity from the monotony of Being.

In society, the artist creates linguistic bridges between consumed elements which aid in the production of complexity, therefore novelty.

My practice searches for fidelity in depiction through the appropriate employ of language.

The temporal landscape my practice is situated in declaims non-linearity, appearing through the deprecation of the codex. It fosters a meta-character capable of involvement with recorded media landscapes of the past, while acknowledging the effect of the ability to traverse the past.

My practice shares interest in equal measure between analysis of materials, methods, modes and process adopted by previous practitioners and the activity of my own creation.

My practice concerns itself with the dynamics that appear to me in life. They appear in the forms I am afforded by the metabolic process.

These dynamics include:

The struggle between the dialectical and the self affirming in process with regards to the derivation of a given image.

The struggle between the economic language of modern media and the aesthetics of economy produced in the thought of its subjects, borne through the cost of everyday decisions and the attribution of value to the contents of moments.

The relationship between the activity of making and the inert quality of its product. The colouring of objects through empathy and the capabilities endowed to the object by its creation/manipulation by the human sensorium and touch.

The mystical encounter between Being and becoming and the limits of the language and logic of communication in coming to understand this encounter between ourselves.

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M. McLuhan is a source of many facets of my inquiry. A key point highlights the relationships between media forms and their effect on each other and us.

He measures these relationships in terms of their effects on the perceptive worlds of individuals and the proportions each sense is allowed to fill in cognition by the training of the consumed media.

Considering the way that my works are operating together in a linear manner as processes of thought, I began to latch onto his idea of content.

New media forms contain their apriori. Additionally, one can consider a completed work as shaped by the media that make up the form that it is derived from. An old media form such as painting may contain a newer media form such as the digital image.

This content may function in two ways: Directly, by being represented in what it imparts on the fundamental subject through its use. Indirectly, through the psychological effect of its employ on the artist, particularly on the perception.

Both have dramatic effects on the outcomes of art works. Especially the indirect effect as this proportioning of sensuality must effect aesthetics and therefore taste and so contribute to the artist's decision making process.

[modernlover2000]

Rembrandt's focus on drawing is inspirational. His works in drawing, printmaking and painting feature an ability to use a range of techniques as appropriate and create internal languages in the works. Often the language is 'cold'. In McLuhanism 'cold' refers to a lack of extraneous information allowing the viewer to actively participate in their completion. Rembrandt's languages are applied in different scenarios of derivation: life, imagination and memory, with continuity as a body of work.

His work primarily revolves around form and light and the sense of these is achieved powerfully by the way that images are worked up from drawing, completed with a keen eye and a masterful sense of material.

This working up is not often pernickety. At times he cuts back to simple drawing with as much grace as with his close modelling work.

The images are often of modest subject but have a great tenderness for life, its vigor and its squalid declines. In particular, personal images are touching: of his family, of the mother and child motif and of age.

The Biblical scenes have a punchy dynamic which emulates the dingy world space of the stories powerfully.

In painting, his work with glazes and impasto combine masterfully to orchestrate colour and tonal modelling.

[modernlover2000]

Picasso's early work has become of interest to me although I've been more drawn to the late work for some time. It's less distilled and symbolic, with classical figurative sensibilities, yet reflects a growth away from the post-impressionistic milieu that was popular at the time.

The Rose Period sees a technical marriage of his abilities in line drawing and painting. These works have a beautiful quality for this marriage.

I'm most interested in his earlier riffing on Impressionism. In such works you see the toil of his attempt to find an independent voice from amongst the remains of the dynamism of the prior generations of artists, set to the backdrop of his arrival in their city, Paris.

There's a play and inquiry into the capabilities of colour, the colour plane and texture which affect rapid iterations between paintings. He isn't set in a style and so each painting feels unique, speaking of a searching for appropriate language. This search is important to my practice because I'm interested in fostering fidelity in my works and I think that language is a cornerstone of this process.

[modernlover2000]

Erle Loran's book on Cezanne conceptualises the colour plane as a tool of space division and modelling, creating an understanding of Hot Abstraction through this idea. It locates the line as a tool that reinforces the colour plane. It implies a method of observation where in the picture plane is exerted over the perception, as a window into the picture box, a conceptualisation of the relationship between the picture plane and the observation of space.

Exploring this method opened a pathway to an ease of observation in my work that has been transformative. The practice of this method raises an interest in the further contents of the book that show how Cezanne manipulated his observations in the process of transference onto the physical picture plane. This is because of the arbitrary decisions one must make in composition.

Cezanne's comment pertaining to the importance of the primitive shapes in drawing is immediately cryptic, as Cezanne does not seem to follow this principle. in discussion H. Gibbons Guy, my life drawing tutor at The Royal Drawing School proposed it was to do with the choice of rounding or flattening a form. We can understand stylistic choices are made in the treatment of observed forms with regard to their construction out of these primitives.

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Matisse's concept of locking together forms to create a drawing. With his search for the essence of figures, his lack of preciousness in reworking has been stressed to me by H. Gibbons Guy and C. Mann, at the Royal Drawing School. Both ideas are very important to my work.

I admire Matisse's search for the essence of the figure which I equate to the recreation of the encounter. The encounter is important to me because it relates to the idea of power and presence in an image, creating seduction. The idea of a work being seductive was introduced to me by N. Rumming and can be used as a principle of economy in image making: to find what is desirable to bring truth to a subject in its production as a physical object.

I'm also interested in the way that Matisse began to use the interactions of planes in place of lines in his later work. This was also adopted by Picasso.

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Courbet has a way of painting which feels tied to his materialist subject matter and thought. It's an effects style of painting that has focus on weight and texture.

This way of painting is interesting to me because I favor cold media which allow the audience in to an image, which is key to fostering feeling.

I associate Courbet's materialistic approach to a way of drawing that is used by H. Gibbons Guy. In this mode the observed face of a form is imagined as part of a 3D totality which is locked into conjoining 3D forms, imagined in the same way. In this way an object is built up. Perhaps this is somewhere between Matisse's interlocking and Cezanne's notion of construction from simple volumes.

I associate this with Courbet as it builds up a material weight which is reminiscent of what Courbet seems to be looking for in his painting.

This mode is useful for making sculpture from a variety of derivations and has been instrumental to my figurative works in wax.

[modernlover2000]

I found an interest in the life drawings of Rodin because of his expressive use of line reached through academic, tonal drawing. This is used alongside wash to give a sense of weight.

I had a coincidental encounter with his sculptures in the V&A which was moving. Not realising they were there and suddenly coming upon them, having spent so much time with his drawings. The experience gave me an idea of the progression from drawing to sculpture, particularly in bronze. The interaction between these two mediums.

This space contains the encounter between the materials and processes of sculpture and those of drawing, extending the dimensions of drawn form and shape. This requires a development of visualisation of actualisation to meet the tactility of the medium. This opens mental space that is different in character to that of an optical artist. The process of realising this cognitive method changed my perception.

[modernlover2000]

I met J. Bunker in The Pride of Spitalfields. He gave me some advice along the lines of simply doing it (the art.) I looked at his folded cardboard works online. On occasion I'd find the need to occupy myself at pubs as I don't drink and make sculptures out of cigarette/filter boxes.

I was looking for a path into direct burnout, a metal casting technique. L. MacLeod (Camberwell's casting technician) having mentioned it to me as an avenue into bronzework. This seemed like a good starting point. The idea of direct burnout being that the materials must be flammable/meltable within the investment.

in practice the mode had a relationship to pattern cutting I'd seen friends in fashion use to produce garments, along with the material connection to origami.

I augmented this method with the addition of wax.

J. Bunker works with abstract form in sculptural space. I became interested having seen A. Daneo Santos Lima's bronze from last year's degree show. Later I realised that this is fundamentally tied to M. Lupertz' works in bronze.

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The first encounter I can recall with J. Tomlin's work was at around 19. This time was formative for me. A clearing of experience. His interview with Ingleby Gallery resonated with me, in the way he thought about artwork and artifacts of the past and produced works out of the European Figurative Modernist Language.

His ideas about scale, on the handheld sculpture and his act of producing embodiments of the conclusions of Modernist Still Lives would become a direct inspiration.

Recently I saw his work again and was impressed by his attention to texture and form.

The return to Modernism under the influence of the internet and social media became of broader interest to me having seen a number of Camberwell students adopt a style of painting that draws itself from that period. I call this mode Un-Stuckism because it echos B. Childish's rejection of post-Modernism in favour of an expressive Modernist language yet is Post-Modern in character. It has developed from the consumption of modernist images that is vastly virtual and obfuscates the intentions of Modernism, transmitting only its aesthetics. It has opened up a new route into painting through turning back, yet the act of turning back is into past culture. Unlike Modernism which was an exploration of new possibilities.

[modernlover2000]

In H. Korine's Raiders the works strike a balance between The Euclidean and The Colour Field.

The Colour Field represents the continuous sensual environment appearing in the cognitive environments of the pre and post-literate man.

This continuous sensual environment is hypothesised by M. McLuhan. I've linked it here to the Modernist form developed by M. Rothko at a coinciding time

This body of work combines the literary and post-literary modes of perception present in the artist with a powerful clarity.

This idea of combining modes of perception has been inspirational, along with H. Korine's ability to move between medium and inquiry in his body of work.

The effect of the combination of The Euclidean and Colour Field is achieved with the use of cross contour drawing in paint. This technique is often seen in 18th/19th century engraving to effectively produce volume, in this work it is used to evoke the spontaneous perception of audile-tacile cognition in a visual form. This is a dynamic and contrary development of the technique, which is to the credit of H. Korine's Kaleidoscopic awareness as a practitioner.

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J. Meese introduces the metabolic nature of the artist. In this view arises the materialist reality of embodiment. The life form is a receptacle for energy, drawn to it by consumption. This is reflected by structure of Capitalist society: the parasitic transaction that takes place at as many junctures of consumption as can feasibly be implemented.

In combination with M. McLuhan's idea of the effect of media forms on the mind, one can explain the rise and fall of movements in art history. They are the product of culture, which is derived from the interaction between thought and society, both of which arise from media employed and consumed by individuals.

Although contradictory to the metabolic view, J. Meese's assertion that art cannot be taught holds a truth in the sense of acknowledging that there's no attainments/hierarchies in art. I relate this to 'Zen mind, Beginner's mind'.

This sense leads to a view of the artwork as a metabolic moment and the importance of focus in practice.

J. Meese also makes a point in regard to allowing symbols to become free of human attachment. This may be important for a person to escape the social imposition their experience yet, at the same time, acts as a counter point to the metabolic view. Here exists a juncture in practice: One way leads to poetics and one to reality.

[modernlover2000]

Hegel's 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' has been influential to my thinking, specifically his dialectic. It hinges on the idea that the impression is the synthesis of the subject and the observer.

It became important to me to escape the mechanical in making. The idea of the mechanical comes from 'An Actor Prepares'. Stanislavsky talks about a pitfall in acting where the actor performs a social norm that symbolises what a character is supposed to feel rather than acting in the moment.

When an artist works in a way that is imaginative or reactive to emergent imagery, they work with long standing mental forms developed through metabolism. By its nature this is prescriptive. This is problematic if the artist wishes to progress through images, modes and concerns and the artist is unaware that they are forming a relationship with these forms in production because they are cumulative and slowly develop. The artist becomes stuck in terms of their progression of imagery/mode/concerns. One may then start to think of different derivations of image as dialectical, in differing proportions of observer and subject synthesised and may use this as a means of analysis of derivation of image. D. Surr, a life drawing tutor at The Royal Drawing School, encourages students to tune into the dialectical encounter with the model to find a poetic language in their description. This has a sense of play with this proportion.