From Colossus exhibition, 2014.
About:
Merriweather’s métier is images of luxury — or “luxe,” as the fashion reporters say now — items of jewelry and personal adornment, Champagne, high-end athletic shoes, all meticulously cut from magazines and catalogs and placed on the flat surface of the painting in intricate patterns that convey the juxtaposition of wealth, professional sports, glossy sex, glamour, celebrity culture and other high marks of decadent capitalism. In the pieces he displayed last fall at Tops Gallery and in a few group shows before that, the artist made explicit the social and political implications in this conjunction of conspicuous consumption, the slave trade and our media-saturated state of being.
Eventually the Pendulum swings, 2013.
In “Colossus,” Merriweather ups the ante in terms of dimension — think of those huge Fragonard paintings depicting aristocrats picnicking in Arcadian groves — yet by going more spare (though not subtle) with the collage elements manages to imbue these works with an ethereal aura, like the paintings on the ceilings of Rococo churches and palaces, capering gods and goddesses seen from a distance. The imagery still concentrates on the glitter and glow of silver, gold and platinum bling, sometimes to a startling degree, yet now floral elements make an appearance, too, so that a piece like “I pray I never die (aka your window shattered like it never mattered)” resembles an overheated Victorian botanical print, except for the teeth bared in the center, exposing gold and diamond grillwork.
One of the three largest works, “all gold everything (don’t believe me, just watch),” has at the center a beautiful woman atop whose head perches an old sailing ship, usually a symbol, in Merriweather’s work, for the nefarious traffic in human beings that connected Africa with England and America. This piece features gold bars, Champagne flutes sparkling to the brim, rings and watches and other images of comely young women, including one, in the bottom right corner, who appears to have a scorpion’s tail. All the collage elements are given plenty of space, as if they added up to a new constellation in a transcendent and seductive firmament of the colossus called material possession.
From the Colossus exhibition, 2014.
This spareness doesn’t work in every case. The 12 collage images in “untitled (shooters go after judas)” are arranged only around the four edges of the painting, so the effect is attenuated rather than elegant. Primarily, however, “Colossus” is an impeccably executed and mounted exhibition that seamlessly melds decoration and provocation in an uncannily beautiful manner.