F. Lennox Campello
More Obsessions: Thoughts and things that keep living in my head
Stone
Tower Gallery
7300
MacArthur Blvd.
Glen
Echo, MD 20812
Exhibition: F.
Lennox Campello: More Obsessions
Exhibition
dates: July 5 to 28, 2019
Gallery
Hours: Saturday & Sunday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment
Art
Walk Reception: Friday, July 5, 6 to 8pm
Is technology part of contemporary art? Of course it is!
Is technology a drug that causes obsessions? Of course it is!
A compulsive drive to work the same image or idea repeatedly
is not that rare an issue in the pages of art history. Nearly every major
museum in Europe has a similar version of El Greco’s vision of Christ throwingthe merchants from the Temple, and Mondrian redefined the same abstractcomposition of color blocks over and over, and over, as did Italian artist
Giorgio Morandi, who obsessively returned to the same basic still life over,
and over, and over.
What drives those “obsessions” is a matter for debate, as
well as for much furrowing of eyebrows at art schools across the planet, where
it is generally noted as a negative trait for an artist.
F. Lennox Campello, who the Washington City Paper included a few years back in their annuallisting of Washington’s most interesting people, not only relishes in returning
to the same subject many times over, but in some cases the “many times” have
over the four decades of obsessions delivered interpretations now numbering in
the hundreds for a single subject.
A new obsession to Campello has been the incorporation of
technology to help his other obsession (telling a story via his artwork)
succeed. Video and sound become powerful
narrative additions to almost classical drawings.
“Your Portrait in a
Gallery of Portraits”
is such an obsessive narrative technical and technological composition. In the
charcoal and conte drawing, we see a solitary figure from the back, as she
visits an art gallery. To both sides of the figure embedded digital screen
search online and put a new portrait of a famous person every five seconds on
each screen. The center screen seems empty at first, until a viewer approaches
it, and realizes that their image is now part of the work (captured by a hidden
miniature camera).
The work (exhibited in the DC area for the first time), has
kindled an unexpected response from the viewers during its initial exhibition
at the Art Basel week of art fairs in Miami last year. “I noticed – and recorded
– hundreds and then thousands of people taking a selfie of themselves ‘inside’
my artwork,” notes Campello, “… a selfie of a selfie, if you will…,” he adds.
Other obsessions also make an appearance: the Picts of
ancient pre-Celtic Scotland (where Campello lived for several years), Argentine
revolutionary mass murderer Ché Guevara, the Biblical Eve, and the Kabbalah’s Lilith, Saint Sebastian,
Saint John the Baptist, a naked Supergirl, enjoying a nudie flight, Campello’s
own secret messages in a secret written code.
The artist, who was a US Navy cryptologic officer for over
two decades, has invented a secret visual written language which is a marriage
of ancient Celtic Ogham (the secret writing code of the ancient Druids) with
the more modern US Navy Falcon Codes, a series of phrases with double meanings.
They also appear, hidden in the shadows of bodies and objects throughout some
of the drawings.
