"For this exhibition he started a series of drawings with more hopeful themes, more serene. 'Because the Trump years were so traumatizing.' says Marcel Dzama. 'Also I usually either do political drawing or I go for this kind of vacation feeling. Almost idyllic. A lot of them are based on photographs taken of my son and wife on vacation. I am still playing with this.'" -- art-agenda, January 18, 2020
Hmmm, where to begin? With honesty? The artist has always been honest about why he and fellow Royal Art Lodgers were drawn together -- largely in reaction to an art scene as violent and pretentious as the worst the world (and their city, Winnipeg) had to offer. In the culture of Confession, honesty is an admission, and if the admission indicates an adequate level of vulnerability and doesn't kill anyone or take anything away from them, it converts to truth and its cloth is worn as a protective apron.
A love and desire just like the fire (2020) is a 56.2 x 76 cm ink, watercolour, gouache and graphite on paper work that has forsaken the illustrative nursery rhyme figuration and unmarked snow white non-scapes of earlier Dzama drawings for a floating dreamworld of over-lapping signifiers, a dreamworld that has more in common with the savagery of Paul Gaugin than the amputated naughtiness of Beatrice Potter. Narratively, the title and its drawing suggest a tale of life-long friendship and survival, while any remaining ambiguity is reserved for that which most of us would never admit to. A point worth making? I'm just being honest.
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