FINN LAFCADIO O’HANLON – HISTORY PUTS A SAINT IN EVERY DREAM
26 May 2014 – 08 June 2014
Opening: 28 May 2014, 6:30 – 9:30 PM with an introduction by Jonathan Meese
The young Australian artist, Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon, will present his first-ever European exhibition at Whiteconcepts gallery in Berlin. The exhibition, titled History Puts A Saint in Every Dream, will feature his intricately drawn works in ink on paper.
Although the title is drawn from a lyric by Tom Waits, there is an immediate sense of the weird and medieval in these drawings. References to tattoo and ‘lowbrow’ outsider art, as well as the intricate sci-fi/fantasy of French bandes dessinées are apparent but they are incidental to a visual structure clearly derived from early Renaissance religious art, notably ecclesiastical stained glass windows. These are works that are best read as ‘psychogeographic maps’, tracing the passage of an individual psyche through a series of alternative realities that are often in conflict. Densely drawn, determinedly monochromatic and richly textured, with obscure, syncretic mythological and pop cultural references, negative space is eschewed with almost obsessive determination in order to amplify a dystopian claustrophobia.
In some ways, Finn’s work recalls the cartography of Grayson Perry, notably Perry’s Map Of Nowhere (2008) and Map Of An Englishman (2004), in which layers of symbolism and narrative weave the surreal (and spiritual) with the intimately personal, social and political. The viewer is left to interpret this complex territory on their own terms (as Alfred Korzybski reminds us, the map is not the territory). But under Finn’s hands, the territory is emphatically a re-connection of traditional forms and techniques with contemporary qualms and urban iconography. It manages to be, at once, emphatically of this time –uneasy, post-technological – and hauntingly ancient. It is certainly work that in its intellectual depth and technique belies the artist’s young age.
Born in Brighton, England just 22 years ago, to an Australian father and an Hawaiian-Cherokee mother, Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon grew up among creative, nomadic types in the UK, then Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles, before returning as a teenager to Sydney’s northern beaches. He is a grandson of the late best-selling novelist, Morris West.
Finn’s formal art training ended in high school when his teacher took exception to his various forays into conceptual art – including a specimen bottle filled with his own urine housed in an engraved perspex box – and threw him out of her class. He taught himself photography instead, and his snapshots of the hard partying and self-negating lifestyles of the surfers and skaters who were his peers gained the attention of the highly regarded French photography and visual arts journal, Plateform, which profiled Finn along with more than 20 of his images. The photographs were also exhibited in a one-man show at the Wedge Gallery, at Kinokuniya Bookstore, as part of Sydney’s Head On Photography Festival.
Moving to France in 2012, Finn was immediately intrigued by the medieval illuminated manuscripts and stained glass he came across in regional museums and churches. He began drawing on childhood memories of Mexican day of the dead rituals, Native American iconography, and French graphic novels to create his first series of drawings which were shown in a winter group exhibition at Mick Gallery, in Sydney. Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon is now resident in Berlin.
Artist information and work overview
Interview with Finn Lafcadio O’Hanlon
