{"id":27985,"date":"2023-09-15T15:23:09","date_gmt":"2023-09-15T14:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/?p=27985"},"modified":"2023-09-15T15:23:09","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T14:23:09","slug":"in-photos-look-but-dont-touch-photorealistic-art-by-callum-eaton-at-the-carl-kostyal-gallery-in-mayfair-london-september-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/in-photos-look-but-dont-touch-photorealistic-art-by-callum-eaton-at-the-carl-kostyal-gallery-in-mayfair-london-september-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"In photos: Look But Don’t Touch – photorealistic art by Callum Eaton at the Carl Kosty\u00e1l gallery in Mayfair, London, September 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"In<\/p>\n

The Carl Kosty\u00e1l gallery is currently showing the outstanding exhibition \u2018Look but don\u2019t touch\u2019, by the young artist Callum Eaton.<\/p>\n

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I just loved the work, but the gallery serves up the necessary arty flannel:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHaving pursued that particular painterly perfection of photorealism since his time at Goldsmiths (BA Fine Art, 2019), Callum Eaton watched on with a sense of satisfaction when an inebriated attendee of an early open studio session attempted, inevitably in vain, to interact with a two-dimensional depiction of a conventional cash machine.<\/p>\n

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The frustrated fumblings of Eaton\u2019s incapacitated patron recall that renowned Grecian tale of illusionary artworks, Zeuxis and Parrhasius\u2019 contest of artistic artifice.<\/p>\n

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The latter, incensed at the former\u2019s ability to produce a still-life so accurate that birds would fly down in an effort to pick at the grapes portrayed, decided to develop his own deceitful depiction.<\/p>\n

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When complete, Parrhasius invited his unwitting rival to view his latest masterpiece, safely stored behind the draped curtains of his studio. Upon reaching out to unveil the artwork, an unsuspecting Zeuxis encountered only solid surface and yielded to the superior draughtsman, the curtains themselves being Parrhasius\u2019s painting.<\/p>\n

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For his\u00a0London debut\u00a0exhibition at Carl Kosty\u00e1l, Eaton has made\u00a0an expanded selection of the oft-overlooked street furniture and urban architecture that populate the artist\u2019s hometown. Imbued with an acute awareness of conceptual art developed during his time at Goldsmiths and a wry critique of the ever-increasing commercialisation of contemporary culture\u00a0in\u00a021st-century society, Eaton\u2019s art inhabits\u00a0a world reduced to two dimensions.<\/p>\n

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These everyday objects \u2013 their coin slots, keypads and buttons eagerly awaiting use \u2013 appear rather as readymades. They retain their form but lose their function.<\/p>\n

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Street-side telephone boxes made all but obsolete by mobile phones and now regularly removed by councils and city planners, remain as reliquaries to unrelenting digital advancement.<\/p>\n

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Coca-Cola vending machines replete with Warholian\u00a0repetition expose Eaton\u2019s labour-intensive like-for-like replication of on-demand appeasement, while elevators from the artist\u2019s own studio space\u00a0in the City of London\u00a0retain eerie echoes of their former life ferrying bankers and business people.<\/p>\n

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Employing that trompe-l\u2019\u0153il trickery popularised by French genre-painter Louis-L\u00e9opold Boilly\u00a0 \u2013 whose portrayal of overlaid sheets of paper was selected for the Paris Salon of 1800 \u2013\u00a0 Eaton doggedly documents his everyday environment, each painting becoming a new piece of his Sims-esque city-building expansion pack.<\/p>\n

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And just as the artist is present in Jan van Eyck\u2019s famed Arnolfini Portrait easter-egg or the secret self-portraits that Baroque-period painter Clara Peeters snuck into her still-lives, Eaton himself appears as both an apparition reflected in the door of a launderette\u2019s Washeteria and the example images one might obtain from a Photo-Me self-service photo-booth.<\/p>\n

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The artist as subject \u2013 as object perhaps \u2013 blurring the lines between the real world he inhabits, and the flattened substrata simulation that exists on the surface of each canvas.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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More info<\/h4>\n

Carl Kosty\u00e1l gallery<\/a>
\n12 Saville Row, London W1S 3PQ<\/p>\n

Join the discussion<\/h4>\n
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