Designer trainers reveal how a functional piece of body wear can be transformed by the language of fashion into an object of desire. What the trainers material, line, shape and, most importantly, brand name, communicates about its owner is what Is being purchased. Fashion has always had the role of expressing tribal allegiance. Today's clothing privilege the individual's success over loyalty to a particular lifestyle.
The object cannot speak alone. Advertising instructs the targeted consume with a military precision that leaves no room for random thoughts. The landscape of the mind is mapped out. Meanings are arrived at by free association or the elegant leap of the imagination are identified and put to use. The skills of the dreamer are eagerly exploited - meaning is displaced, condensed, inferred, implied through opposites or suggested by the presence of absence.
The movement across the boundary of art and advertising is not one way. The current cultural package presented to the viewer includes the branded artist, art work, exhibition space and, if applicable the gallery owner or the shows curator.
By transferring a method of painting which has its roots in abstract expressionism from the large scale canvas to the contained surface of a fashion object like the sole of an adidas trainer, John Baldwin illuminates the cross - overs between consumer culture and art culture. Employing a spontaneous 'splatter and splash' style of painting, rich in detail, colour and texture, Baldwin captures the essence of free play whilst at the same time exercising a conscious control over the parameters and the surface on which he paints. The messiness of primitive fantasies, the lack of control that can be exerted over the unconscious, is captured in the dense, swirling, layered colours. Baldwin adds another twist the raw spontaneity held tightly in check on the slick surface of the shoe or the work glove, is enlarged through a specialist micro- photographic technique, transforming globules of paint into fantastical, high tech 'sci-fi' glossy photographs reminiscent of Cindy Sherman's disturbing Cibachromes.
The kind of surrendering of control engaged in by Baldwin leads one to expect an emotional involvement. Yet the painted surfaces and the enlarged high gloss photographs speak of detachment. The act of painting is kept private - none of the emotional intensity, the deep level playing that goes on in the transitional space between artist and object has been referenced in the pieces on show but its presence is implied in the very way Baldwin applies the paint. In this way, Baldwin's work, which could easily slip into a slick, sewn up statement, transcends the sound bite and echoes the history of painting in a way which does not yearn for times lost but speaks of the freshness, the vitality, even the necessity of painting today.
Lynn French M.A. (Fine Art, Goldsmiths) tel: 020 7729 4486