Review: 'The Politics of Pink' at The Dot Project

The Politics of Pink at The Dot Project

The colour pink oscillates between two contemporary poles. Whilst it’s true that gender identity has, for some, become an increasingly fluid concept, unshackling pink from its quasi-victorian hangover of domestic femininity. It seems evident that pink has equally become the lingua franca for a new generation of online culture: the kitsch post-net boudoir of Molly Soda’s 'From My Bedrooms to Yours' (2015); the hyper-pop bubblegum of Hannah Diamond’s early PC-Music track Pink and Blue (2013); or the endless deluge of seapunk and vaporwave’s crypto-ironic love of pink hues, both pastel and neon. In each case the association between pink and femininity is affirmed, if not successfully subverted; reinscribing pink as the operative hue of feminine affect. 

Born from within this matrix is The Dot Project’s latest show ‘The Politics of Pink’, an all-male show of seven contemporary artists who collectively explore the socio-aesthetic power of the colour pink, stretching from its raw affectivity to its constructed social utility. The show has an immediate intimacy to it, a sense helped by the gallery’s own architecture, a cosy two-storey space located on the cordial street of Fulham Road, South Kensington. As such, the paintings are displayed in a soft dialogue, their sustained palettes offering subtle tensions that sew the works together. 

The seven artists on show, despite their analogous palettes - either a mainstay in their practice or chosen specifically for the exhibition - approach the concept through diverse means. Whether it’s the New Age spiritualism meets Kanagawa waves of Matthew F Fisher’s glossy L.A. funk, the corrupted bricolage of digital content found in Konrad Wyrebek’s Pinkey(fvk) (2018) – comprising images of YouPorn, Brexit, flamingos and Angela Merkel’s pantsuit – or the aesthetic counterbalance of metallic and pastel forms in Elliot Fox’s reflections on urban masculinity, the artworks displayed provide a breadth of response to the materiality and semiotics of pink.

Upstairs at The Dot Project are several paintings by the Spanish artist Albert Riera Galceran, a young artist whose practice traverses an array of video, print, paint and photography – guided by the visual language of what he calls ‘pure intuition’. Lacking in any clear corporeal form, the two paintings on show - Untitled I (2018) & Untitled II (2018) - appear as the spontaneous mixture of artistic sense with organic sensibility. Both works are intuitively harmonious, the weight and gravitation of each circular shell drifting across the canvas like leaves in an empyrean fall.

The palette and composition of Untitled I is reminiscent of Lee Krasner’s epic work, The Seasons (1957) - a mixture of olive greens, sky blues and watermelon pinks - a resonance which further lends itself to those viewers with autumnal predilections. The inclusion of a small vignette in the upper right-hand corner – the transgressive drag queen ‘Divine’ of John Water’s notorious black comedy Pink Flamingos (1972) – anchors this ostensible bliss within a radically gendered politics. A pop-cultural thread that runs throughout many of Galceran’s paintings. 

Comparatively, the glaucous blue and faint impression of stems in Untitled II evokes a wintery disposition. The shapes and brevity of this work seem closer to that of a late De Kooning, such as his series of Untitled works – dubbed by MoMA ‘The Late Paintings’ - from the earlier half of the 1980s. Galceran’s work carries with it the same sense of embodied fragility that underscored this later phase of De Kooning’s career, using lyrical and sinuous forms to evoke the biomorphic harmony of nature. A work which carries itself with the best of its contemporaries, such as the paintings of Caterina Silva or Jenny Brosinski. 

Downstairs at the gallery, hung adjacent to several textured works by Richie Culver – a pair of grittier works which combine pasted wallpaper with blackletter captions such as ‘Kingdom’ and ‘Pound’ – are another pair of paintings, this time form artist Reuben Beren James. A fleshy mixture of white, pink and salmon, the two works resemble Cy Twombly’s virulent mark-making, colours mixed after a visit to the slaughterhouse. Their complete lack of figuration suspends the works in pure abstraction, pushing compositional logics to the extreme. The excision of an inverted rectangular strip – a silkscreened layer, the result manipulated files repressed on canvas and further approached with paint – introduces a photographic clarity to the right-hand work, The sit and straddle (2018).

Poised next to the haptic work of Culver, James’ two works are the clearest manifestation of pink pushed to its affective limit. In a brief interview with The Dot Project, James was explicit in its reference to the ‘cultural connotations’ of pink and femininity; the title of his series, ‘Pink is for Pussies’, seemingly cut from the primordial soup of kiss-and-chase playground politics, an innocuous yet ossifying stage for the development of gender normativity in contemporary life. The various titles themselves – The sit and straddle, The up and over (2018) and The down but not out (2018) – are ambiguous enough, however are drawn from sexual positions listed in Cosmo’s voluptuous column: ‘7 Sex Positions Pretty Much Guaranteed to Help You Orgasm’ – a Delphic whisp to the subconscious edge of affective representation, and a clear nod to the continuing symbolic assumptions associated with a pink laced with its own ferocity and power. 

As a whole, ‘The Politics of Pink’, in keeping with its conceptual provenance, remains playfully ambivalent in its conclusions. The artists presented tease the colour’s cultural associations, if – in the case of Galceran – occasionally charging their work with a more provocative referent. To quote James himself, “Think of it like a Rorschach test, only instead of me letting you freely associate the abstract forms, I push the viewer to assess their character beyond the formal qualities.” For now, it would seem that the progression of pink towards gender-neutrality remains inchoate, not least for the attempts made to marketize this shift when it does happen. However, the paintings displayed at The Dot Project are clever ruminations on the sense of pink that forever escapes our socially informed biases; a prefigurative wink to its raw and latent affectivity. A gesture we could say is, in and of its self, political.