Craig Drennen: Pale Fire

Since 2008, Craig Drennen has organised his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, arguably the worst play from one of the world’s best authors. This long-form project includes painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, performance, and video, prompted by the list of characters from the play. Each character is embodied by a series of work constructed from contemporary, historic, and autobiographical references, each with a distinct method of execution, allowing Drennen to continuously expand his exploration of painting and contemporary artmaking. Brigitte Mulholland is proud to present the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris, Pale Fire. The show is comprised of new paintings and drawings, as well as archival photographs from earlier performances, contextualising the new work and offering visitors an opportunity to explore a few of the many rich and complex worlds that Drennen has crafted for each of Shakespeare’s characters. The title, Pale Fire, is a direct reference to one of the only passages in the play that many scholars believe to be completely written by Shakespeare: in Act 4, scene 3, the titular Timon rants for multiple pages about thievery, accusing even the moon of being “an arrogant thief / and her pale fire she snatches from the sun.”

For the character of Apemantus, the philosopher who often skewers other characters, Drennen utilizes performance art. He performs the song Awful (1998) by Hole repeatedly in public while wearing an oversized paper mâché head which is a caricature of his own appearance. The prosthetic heads continue on after the performance as an eccentric form of painting: the performance date is written on the forehead of each severed head. Detached from the performance that produced it, it becomes akin to the celebration of an assassination: the disembodied head of a deposed tyrant hung high to laud his demise. Here, that dead tyrant is the artist. Accompanying the photographs are a number of new painted drawings of these severed heads; two in which the severed heads are covered in a large painterly X, with the exhibition’s title, Pale Fire, in delicate handpainted typeface across the bands; the artist thus the maker of his own creation, then erasure and demise.

In this exhibition, we are also introduced to the newest character of Flavius. The paintings and drawings devoted to him exist on custom-made supports in the shape of a guillotine blade. The blade silhouette returns painting itself to the position of public spectacle – much like the performances – here with the distinct echo of revolution, and compounding on the metaphor. The artist is also creating the blades that will sever his own head. The paintings and drawings are populated with constellations of handmade cardboard stars, painterly palettes, impastoed T’s – all demonstrating Drennen’s masterful ability to paint trompe l’oeil.

The Timon of Athens work is as complex and multi-faceted as the canon of the Bard himself; likewise expressing universal themes on the human condition and the role that creativity and creators play within larger philosophical conversations. Drennen’s deeply personal use of autobiography reflects his acute understanding of the role of the artist in society and art history. Each character newly raises existential questions about our own humanity, and about the creative act - how the canon is created or chosen, the role of an artist to respond to and question it – and above all, the contradiction in both the humility and bravado needed in the act of making art itself.