The World Over My Shoulder
David Holden’s exquisitely wrought paintings, in this exhibition, unpack and re-examine the burden and the joy of the past—a past that is both tinctured with the artist’s own history and, simultaneously, informed by the echoes and artifacts of a culture in poignant retreat from the present.
Holden is a virtuoso reclaimer of experience, an archeologist of the soon-to-be forgotten, a collector and archivist of all that is continually passing away. In painting after painting, he brings his hallucinatory, mimetic ability to the service of the memory-made-palpable.
In work after work, varieties of nostalgia become newly inspectable because of his incorporation, within the paintings, of objects and events which can seem initially eccentric, idiosyncratic or marginalized by the impress of the personal, but which, shortly thereafter, within the image-theatre of each painting, are transformed into talismanic, epiphanic moments. This is an admittedly mysterious process, by which the personal and the local suddenly open out to become all-embracingly archetypal, and the flickering of the instance hardens into the emblematic.
A consideration, in some detail, of one of Holden’s teeming paintings, may help to illuminate some of the complexities of his project. His Osaka, for example, is replete with disparate objects that have been rescued from the abrupt juxtapositions associated with surrealism by their having coalesced into a initially puzzling but ultimately eloquent configuration—a kind of utterance made of objects. Floating against the skyline of Osaka, Japan (Holden is always very busy with architecture and, in particular, with the emotive effects of changing architectural scales) is what appears, at first, to be a salmon-hued suitcase. It turns out to be, in fact, a Sony Walkman. What is currently technologically ineffectual turns insistently into art, once our consumerist backs are turned.
The Walkman’s emptied interior is partly filled again by a bird’s nest—presumably belonging to the strangely inert goldfinch (all of Holden’s birds look disturbingly taxidermic) perched on a curious, esophagus-like speaking tube which is attached, outlandishly, to the machine. This liver-coloured, organ-like passage of rather sinister, dead-tech ineffectuality (amplified, as it were, by the empty Walkman) seems to speak to the inexplicable sadness of the immediate past (is anybody there?). The orphaned lily in Osaka functions as both a benediction and a farewell. The goldfinch, like the birds that appear in so many of the artist’s paintings, seems to function as a witness to the flux, the fluidity, of time’s passing. The bird is time’s interlocutor.
In Holden’s hands, the past is not so much prologue, as it is a perpetual coda to the present. Holden’s paintings, so replete with icons of directed observation (birds, speakers, ornaments), are, for him, like diaries—and self-portraits. And much of what is embodied in his pictures is the bittersweet stuff of the past (his and everybody’s), reworked in the present. Many of his paintings invoke family holidays—especially Christmas: note the red Christmas star in Goldfinch, the Magritte-like, hovering disco-ballroom tree ornaments in Fountain (Madonna of the Firecracker Frogs), and the bowls of cinnamon candies in Messenger (with its presiding Passenger Pigeon).
David Holden’s intricate and demanding paintings, though thoroughly laced with nostalgia, are scrupulously, impeccably kept from sentimentality. His growing up in Montreal is often present in the works—in images that float as free as reveries. His traveling is there as well (his trip to Japan in 2005 is echoed in his Momento Mori (Happy Birthday), with its glittering background of the Mori Arts Center in Tokyo, and in a shard of the Tokyo City Hall down in the corner of Messenger), but these forays into the autobiographical past and the geographically remote are kept from the abyss of the sentimental by virtue of the artist’s insistence on the concreteness, the exactness, of his depictions of his selection of objects and settings.
It is as if Holden’s journeys into his memorial unconscious were like his entering a mine or descending into the sea—and bringing back to the surface certain hard, highly-defined images and objects for examination in the light. Everything in his paintings is fully disclosed. Which is what makes them uncanny.