H-ardcore

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The title of the exhibition is “H-ardcore”. I coined the title “H-ardcore” to disambiguate it from the negative connotations of 'hardcore'. I want to emphasize a ‘human core’, here understood as the "unyielding or intransigent element" as well as the natural and chronic features, inherited genetically and culturally, that characterize the human condition. Dictionaries generally define ‘hardcore’ as a dedicated or fanatical nucleus of a group, movement, or social structure that is unlikely to change, or to people in a hopeless irremediable condition. Hardcore also refers to explicit sexual situations and representations. What is fundamentally common to all these is the human being’s complex core of lived experience in response to developmental (in a wide sense) and evolutionary pressures. H-ardcore addresses deep and obstinate functional and morphological features of our being, that affect us profoundly in how we make sense of ourselves and of the political, social, cultural, and religious, realities in which we live.

Caesar’s ideograms are the product of many years of sketchbook activity. Their constitution is complex, and like Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, they form composites which germinate in the deep subconscious of their unorthodox maker’s mind in order to confront human accountability and question the nature of life itself. Like the human, they mature over time and become mere reflections of what once was. Similar to man’s ability to produce progeny, they finally take form as clones already in their dotage on the walls or in the spaces of the gallery. These carnal effigies have no confines and bear no spatial or aesthetic relationship to their surroundings. They are very much like standalone resemblances; insular and solitary strangers that occupy their very own space unheedingly.

The objects that share the gallery space with the ideograms in this exhibition, such as the familiar bed (or as Caesar refers to it as the resting place for tired humanity), a common object which regularly features in Caesar’s work particularly in the paintings of the 1990s; the playful but sinister swing, with its linear straw construction, almost a line drawing by its very own design; and the Baroque picture frame, an object of artistic reverie and historical consequence are devices hand-picked with intense personal discernment. Like the drawings, they disregard the gallery environment and stand for what they truly are – sentient prosthetics to garnish the human endeavour.

The H in H-ardcore also separates us from them, humans from any other being on earth. The work burrows inside us searching for a justification to our abusive superiority. The exhibition poses a fundamental question regarding the true value of humanity – where unfortunately, the answer is only to be found in George Bernard Shaw’s famous adage: Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Vince Briffa

Exhibition

Exhibition Photos

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