• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Stamm

Digesting Michael

July 2012 by Rob McHaffie

image_pdfimage_print

In 2010, I visited Fergus Binns quite regularly for lunch at Friends of the Earth. We’d nibble on our organic lunch plate and then head upstairs to his Smith Street studio to have a look at what he was up to. The painting taking shape for the bulk of that year was Toy painting (Alice in Neverland), a huge exploration in oil paint that calls on pop imagery and art history to unpack HIStory. I walked away from my first encounter quite flabbergasted at the sheer ambition of the work. Two years later and it’s still on my mind. The painting roams across an expanse of psychology and painting territory, crossing the gruesome power of paintings such as Goya’s Saturn devouring one of his sons with a sea of fairy-tale symbols surrounding the King of Pop’s harassment within the psychedelic Neverlandscape. Like Jackson himself, the painting is best left with this short introduction or a very long analysis.

Fergus Binns is a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary and has a show opening at Utopian Slumps on 19 October this year.

Fergus Binns, ‘Toy painting (Alice in Neverland)’ (detail), 2010, oil on canvas, 152 x 121 cm
Fergus Binns, ‘Toy painting (Alice in Neverland)’ (detail), 2010, oil on canvas, 152 x 121 cm
Fergus Binns, ‘Toy painting (Alice in Neverland)’ (detail), 2010, oil on canvas, 152 x 121 cm
Fergus Binns, ‘Toy painting (Alice in Neverland)’ (detail), 2010, oil on canvas, 152 x 121 cm
Fergus Binns, ‘Toy painting (Alice in Neverland)’, 2010, oil on canvas, 152 x 121 cm
Fergus Binns

Categories: July 2012, Rob McHaffie, Stamm 2012 Tags: Fergus Binns

Primary Sidebar

About

This is the archive for Stamm, an online publishing project initiated by artist Jonathan Nichols in 2012.  [Read More] about About

Years

  • Stamm 2015
  • Stamm 2013
  • Stamm 2012

Writers 2015

  • Eliza Dyball
  • Amita Kirpalani
  • Michelle Mantsio
  • Kyla McFarlane
  • Anca Verona Mihulet
  • Jonathan Nichols
  • Tom Polo
  • Caterina Riva
  • Quentin Sprague
  • Sacha Waldron
  • Suzette Wearne

Writers 2013

  • Trevelyan Clay
  • Amita Kirpalani
  • Michelle Mantsio
  • Jonathan Nichols
  • Lisa Radford
  • Quentin Sprague
  • Pip Wallis

Writers 2012

  • Mila Faranov
  • Amita Kirpalani
  • Hannah Mathews
  • Rob McHaffie
  • Jonathan Nichols
  • Quentin Sprague
  • Eve Sullivan
  • Pip Wallis