Painting is probably the most post-modern medium. Because of its historical background and its low-tech qualities, it appeals to artists who are critical of contemporary mass communication and other forms of cyber-hysteria. Painting is slow, tactile and its results are physical objects that can be considered as obstacles. Perception and interpretation cannot be separated from the physical, painted thing. Michael Laird (°NY, 1963) can be considered as a post-modern painter pur sang. Educated in the traditional skills of drawing and painting, but being as much a reader and a thinker, he tries to connect conceptual research with a painterly approach. In the nineties, his paintings showed constructivist décors with isolated motifs floating above them. The fragments of objects and people, taken from popular imagery such as comic books, clashed with the high-modernist colourfield backgrounds. One particular series of paintings, titled Project for the Psychedelic Transformation of the United States Government (PFTPTOTUSG), referred to an artist’s conspiracy of overthrowing the American government. At the turn of the millennium, Laird decided to translate his fundamental doubts and criticisms about the American Dream into a more direct and time-based strategy, creating several performance- and video works.

In his recent work, he returns to painting and to his love of B-movies. The exhibition Transformer shows paintings from 2008 and 2009. The title of the show refers to his primary source of inspiration, horror movies from the sixties and seventies (the artist calls them one of his ‘guilty pleasures’). Michael Laird especially likes the irrational aspects of horror, functioning as a kind of counter image of modern society. Although films such as A Bay of Blood (Mario Bava, 1971) may contain brutal scenes of terror, Laird does not refer to these in his paintings. Starting from the more innocent and tranquil-looking film stills, the painter tries to transform the tension and the mood of the scene into a pictorial experience. But what Laird really likes in these movies (especially the Roger Corman and Hammer House of Horror films) is the often extremely psychedelic atmosphere and the extreme visual effects.

The use of saturated colors and pictorial deformations make some film sequences look like psychedelic underground movies. Some of the films have a vaguely Victorian or Symbolist setting, and Laird especially likes the way the 1960’s directors are projecting some of their postwar ideas into a fake 19th century context.

This way, we see the 19th century through a 1960’s lens: symbolism and psychedelics meet.  In Laird’s paintings, the typical ‘in-between’ film scenes that establish the mood of alienation, are isolated and transformed into autonomous compositions. He likes to work with intense, sometimes even frivolous looking colourfields of pink, yellow, blue and green, that make the characters float into the space and that can be considered as an ‘offense against good taste’.  They try to capture the irrational mood of the original film stills. In some cases the clouds in the backgrounds are painted in an almost impressionist way (probably inspired by the cloudy skies the artist can see from his studio window). The paint (acrylic or oil) dialogues with the charcoal under-drawing, showing the pictorial process in a rather ‘incomplete’ state and creating a tension between these parts and the more elaborated ones. Using rather small-scale canvases, the artist creates concentrated, isolated images/objects that might invite the visitor to compose alternative sequences or possible story lines.                    

                      Text by Johan Pas, Ekeren, january 2009