Lightmare Fuel
Solo Exhibition by Alexander Small
18th November 2021
Lightmare Fuel is a juxtaposition of the serious and the silly, taking its cue from the visual culture of the trickster archetype Bugs Bunny significant forms were used to make a visual language which appears across paintings, prints and sculpture.
Techniques include both painting and printmaking, the paintings are both oil and acrylic on canvas. Images are worked up from sketchbook drawings and then painted freehand employing a variety of painting tropes, including joke abstraction, faux expressionistic gestures and uneven airbrushing laying bare the mechanics of the medium.
The prints are a type of unique monotype print there is only one of each print from the printing plate. Each plate has movable elements which can be placed in different areas or added to or taken away so no two prints are the same. The prints are made in series and so often have the images building up and leaving residue or ghost images from the previous elements. These elements such as the rib cage can appear in several different prints.
Visual elements include bunny ears drawn from Bugs Bunny's distinctive and characterful ears and appear in various forms relating to the serpentine line. Voids based on the rabbit hole often seen in animations can be thresholds or open mouths or other holes in liminal spaces. The cartoon eyes comedic or menacing a universal sign drawn from ancient times like the evil eye or the eye of God, could be cartoon rabbit eyes or disembodied presences referring to the gaze or surveillance. Ribcage form is derived directly from a cartoon in which Bugs finds himself trapped under a cartoon skeleton for a brief moment he contemplates mortality but realises he's still alive. A type of death reference in the tradition of mementoe mori's.
