Wear What You Like
Text by Emma Dexter

Looking at Rose Wylie’s 21/2 D paintings is taking a journey back through time to those idealised drawings of the homes and gardens of our childhood where we paid graphic homage to the people and places that nurtured us. Wylie, however pays homage to much more than that it her zany, eclectic paintings, the references range far and wide, from primitive painting through Ancient Egyptian and Roman painting to the medieval, and on to contemporary animation, also, autobiographically, they scan experiences from earliest childhood, through to the mini inspirations sparked by details of contemporary consumer product packaging. Am image magpie, Wylie collages memories, ideas and found images to create drawings and paintings whose superficial innocence is deceptive. The naivety conveyed by her primitive images becomes prised apart by closer inspection, and out of its ruptured carapace spills the anarchy of the subconscious, to have its wicked way. The ‘Girls on a Flying Bomb’, for instance are like some sort of death-wish that keeps re-appearing, first over the Alps, and then over a hat extravaganza in Italy-Wylie herself makes no such claims but sees them as means to formal divisions-and here we have fantasy inflicting on us a harsh reality through the agency of memories arising out of the subconscious-found upon childhood experience of watching doodlebugs over Kent during the Second World War. We find ourselves caught up in some desperate situations here, which are trying hard to pose as normality.

In the ‘Twink and Ivy’ paintings the transience of the characters is signalled by the tabs that seemingly attach them to the narratives, which have, only tentatively, become theirs. They are not exactly embraced by reality but more stuck onto it by virtue of adhesive technology. But don’t we all sometimes feel as if we are stuck onto reality, hoping that the glue holds? These tabs are all an illusion anyway, within a further illusion, within…ad infinitum, and this chain of illusions might transport us back to Alice’s Adventures in that tricky house with its tricky contents and their even trickier content. Coincidentally here, the Twinks, with their prehensile limbs also seem to be girls getting up to mischief, apparently lost in chaotic spontaneity in their bizarre paved forest.

Rose Wylie’s quirky paintings are richly associative, mixing as they do, numerous different and often clashing source materials, fusing ancient and modern references into a bold and gutsy whole.

But where does this associative quality come from and what does it give the work? One answer to this question is that, at the core of Wylie’s practice, lies drawing. This is not simply evident in the fact that Wylie often exhibits drawings and works on paper alongside her paintings, but that the paintings themselves, with their strong use of graphic line, the grounds of unpainted canvas, but also something of the character of the mark-making is heavily indebted to a very particular kind of drawing. This is the antithesis of close observational drawing - it is what Deanna Petherbridge has described as a ‘phenomenological and gestural anti-methodology’. It is a style of drawing that is highly personal, utterly contemporary in its rendering and informality, and yet by means of line, fashion, narrative suggestion, strongly reminiscent of bye-gone days.

Wylie’s work expresses an inherent subjectivity –childhood doodles done in idle moments; it has the power to conjure everything we know about the imagination, adolescent longing, desire, hopes and fears.
Wylie’s women and girls are worthy of close examination. At first sight they remind one of the more innocent locker-room drawings of forces’ sweethearts, with their small waists, tiny hands and feet, big eyes, lashes and hair. But Wylie’s own idiosyncratic style turns these conventions or stereotypes into humorous, bold and ambiguous icons of womanhood. A direct reference in two paintings to Uma Thurman’s role in Kill Bill - the ultimate female fantasy of power and revenge, and a series of new drawings entitled Beauty Stereotype, suggests Wylie is explicitly confronting the age-old feminist battleground of dress, appearance, beauty and power. The sophistication of Wylie’s approach is grounded in the combination of her stylistic historical references: Egyptian figures, medieval wall painting, El Greco, Posada, South Park, are all synthesized to create a contemporary icon – reminiscent of the kore, the archaic Greek clothed female figure, that somehow embodies the complexity of woman, viewed through a prism of historical representation. With wit, irony, pathos and stoicism, Wylie’s female figures continue to sit, stand, pose, as they have always done; and somehow, embedded within these forms lies the memory of countless other historical representations of femininity.

Wylie’s imagery asserts how political codes are embedded within aesthetics: a young girl learns to draw the female figure in the style given to her by patriarchy, a style that has not changed in essence from the pin-up of the 1940s, to the Heat magazine imagery of today. Wylie acknowledges those influences but also subverts them: leaving us with a curious cocktail that contains pathos and a liberating enlightenment in equal measure. Wear What You Like, suggests that Wylie advocates not only stylistic and aesthetic freedom within her own work, but also an end to the obsession with the stylistic dictates of the fashion and makeover police, currently dominating television and magazines.

Emma Dexter

Wylie’s world is one of expanded possibilities, which are endlessly spawned by the rich divergence of eclectic source from which these works are drawn. Where dose ‘Hong Kong Sharon’ come from, bringing her intriguing personal struggle between ‘townie bimbo’ and inscrutable oriental sageness? Certainly from a different place to the other ‘Sharon’, who is suffering more from split personality than identity crisis, and Little Bo Peep who pops up in ‘City Road’ looks not only as if she has lost sheep but also her way, and by her distracted look, also her marbles. A brief visual voyage through Wylie’s chaotic maze of narrative possibilities, leaves one feeling breathless but fresh, mind-boggled but ready for more.