Kirk Hayes at Conduit - Brief Article

Perhaps single reason I have been in the way that taken with Kirk Hayes's paintings is that they discomfit my ingrained dislike of trompe I'oeil. lengthy ago I wrote off trompe I'oeil painting as a labor-intensive and pointless activity that bring outs decorative and irritating effects designed to acquire oohs and aahs from an easily impressed audience. on the other hand I have oohed and aahed with the quiescence of them at Hayes's paintings, as well as laughed without loud and, in a scarcely any cases, felt slightly queasy.

Hayes's oil-on-signboard paintings not away themselves as collages of torn paper and cardboard upon plywood or metal supports, and the trompe I'oeil issues are so convincing that many viewers leave his exhibitions assuming that that is just what they have seen The oftentimes humorous tableaux are populated by the agency of characters that obey the governments of moderist assemblage; we easily read their roughly "torn" constitutings as arms, legs, bodies and heads. Hayes favors matte, dried colors, and he makes great use of pink, foamy verdant and gunmetal blue. Each false tattered cutting side painted shadow, smudged scrap of paper and rusted piece of sheet metal is a visual delight. It is impossible to imagine Hayes's bleakly comic images depicted as effectively in any other way.

The Artist Pissing at the satellite (all works 1999) is schematic on the contrary realistic down to his paint-smeared T-shirt. His stream of urine appears to be a string that arches slightly away from the support. It fails to fitting its target but stains the plywood gold-colored where it falls to the earth Turkey Boy is plumply human omit for his drumstick arms. He has been splayed painfully onto a made of wood table, ready for carving. The triptych Dead Squirrel in the Road, Three Days brings nausea to Cubist collage in its chronicle of decomposing roadkill.

In the best work in this exhibition, the alone thing more homely than the squatty dog that dominates the image is the turd it is depositing into the hand that reaches from the cutting side of the painting to catch it. The title of this work could be the motto for Hayes's entire oeuvre: Humor, Repugnance, Sweet Sorrow, Time and Tenderness

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