The Hayward Gallery in London has been holding a retrospective exhibition of works by British pop art artist Patrick Caulfield who still remains not well known in Europe. 63-year-old Caulfield who contrary to David Hockney did not settle in the U.S only had two exhibitions in France in 1993 and 1996. This retrospective exhibition, due to last until April 11th 1999, will be shown afterwards to Luxembourg, Lisbon and Yale during the next few months. Caulfield is an artist much more important than one could imagine as his works are closely related to the evolution of society during these past forty years.
Caulfield's works are much ironical as they don't show what the viewer thinks he is seeing.
His method is apparently quite simple: he takes a big size canvas, chooses a subject and an explicit title and includes a decor to which he adds lines that as a whole is quite deceitful. This might be a hotel room, a bedroom or else with an opening on a countryside view. Nature in fact is shown through advertising images, landscapes are taken from postcards and interiors from the pages of fashion magazines. Abstraction borders realism and violent neon like colors explode on the canvas among geometric lines.
In 1961 Caulfield demonstrated how masterpieces could be transformed into posters with Delacroix as a designer and Fauvism as a tourist guide illustration. Caulfield only tries to capture visions like when he painted a homage to Juan Gris and proves to be a master in producing faked collages such deceptive tricks being intended to represent contemporary chaos in a somewhat logical way.
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