Charlie Billingham

Travesía Cuatro presents Solitaire by British artist Charlie Billingham.

Charlie Billingham’s artistic production is based on the social and political English cartoons of the late Georgian and Regency Eras (c.1780s - 1830s) when due to the advancements in science and technology images started to be distributed more widely around the world. The artist takes this graphic archival material and actualizes it through painting, sifting the mechanical image of yesteryear into contemporary painting and thus making explicit the dialectic relation between mechanical and artisanal production through modernity. In this recovery of archival material Billingham frames and edits elements, characters and circumstances in a playful and sardonic way. This use of framing and edition reminds us of other mechanical forms of art like photography and cinema and their own problematization of mechanical reproduction.

In this, his third exhibition in the country and first in Mexico City, entitled Solitaire, the artist has focused on single figures and individuals. The exhibit, like many by the artist, incorporates in situ painting installations. In this case two: a grid made out of single figure playing cards over a green background - a Solitaire game made out of solitaire figures; and a single XVIII century sailboat and its double, the singularity made evident by its repetition. This game about the game itself, the loneliness that the game and the journey relieve, unfolds throughout the paintings that make up the exhibition, whether through the equestrian core or in the domestic sails made out of drying knickers.

The coming and going between the start of the Modern Era and the Present liberates in Billingham’s oeuvre on the one hand the condition of modernity itself: the ever growing and accelerating reproduction and circulation of images, the relativization of historical and mundane time. But on the other hand, this juxtaposition of different historical times, images and ways of making uncovers the day to day wisdom that sustains satire and humor; always attached to the Body. This single thread of body, humor and game crosses through Pompeiian murals, Rabelais novels and the satirical cartoons of XVIII century Britain but also through contemporary memes and Tiktok videos.

Finally, Solitaire reminds us that in our solitude we contain the whole of humanity and that even though we are always surrounded by it we are always alone. This paradox, the base of the human condition, is transcended more often than not through humor and game in an ecumenical Solitaire game.

—Pablo Arredondo

Gallery participating in GAMA WEEK from September 19 to 22, 2024.