JAKE OR DINOS CHAPMAN. WHITE CUBE | LONDON

Jake or Dinos Chapman. White Cube

Mason’s Yard & Hoxton Square, London

15 Jul—17 Sep 2011

Text by Francesca Di Fraia

Probably the only ones of the Young British Artists group that did not graduate at the Goldmiths Art College, Jake and Dinos Chapman return to  East London with a show titled Jake or Dinos Chapman. The exhibition is hosted by White Cube, the private gallery owned by the ex Conservative MP and popular art dealer, Jay Joplin. Being closely associate whit the YBA group, Joplin’s gallery almost accounts for a Post-human trend temple.

Jake or Dinos Chapman, as the title suggests, occupies two separate buildings: the old industrial development in Hoxton Square, and the White Cube branch in Mason’s Yard, not too far from Piccadilly. This physical separation speaks of what the essence of the Chapman brother’s work is, a singular duality (unlike Gilbert & George’s), a research which is independent from each other’s objectives. A research where aesthetics is not the ultimate goal or result. In fact, aesthetics is what needs to be disfigured, what has to be challenged and finally defeated in the spirits of their early post-human production. As a matter of fact, in 1992 the bothers established a shared discourse  as ‘’sore-eyed scopophiliac oxymorons with a benevolent contingency of conceits’.  Once again they present revolting iconoclastic sculptures, card board sculptures made of recycled material (in other words ‘rubbish’), disfigured mannequins, and religious subject paintings set in a humble, if not squalid, environment. It is, of course, what the two artists intended to achieve. Challenging the contemporary politics, religion and morality, no matter how supposedly surpassed these are since, as the brothers believe, Nazi-fascism is the ‘return of the repress’. As Dinos claims, the Chapman brothers ‘don’t believe in a progressive culture’ and such belief, or lack of it, translates into a shocking absence of prettiness. In a world context of established powers, jet sets, markets, influential figures, and faiths, the Chapman brothers wittingly seek to suggest that ours might be a different world if the its symbols are de-coded and re-coded, and consequently cast in a miserable environment.

Francesca Di Fraia

Further information: http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/jake_dinos_chapman_jake_or_dinos_chapman

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