Solitaire

Charlie Billingham’s (b.1984) artistic production is based on the social and political English cartoons of the late Georgian and Regency Eras (c.1780s – 1830s) when due to the advancements in science and technology, images started to be distributed more widely around the world. The artist takes this graphic archival material and actualizes it through painting, sifting the mechanical image of yesteryear into contemporary painting and thus making explicit the dialectic relation between mechanical and artisanal production through modernity. In this recovery of archival material Billingham frames and edits elements, characters and circumstances in a playful and sardonic way. This use of framing and edition reminds us of other mechanical forms of art like photography and cinema and their own problematization of mechanical reproduction. 

In this, his third exhibition in the country and first in Mexico City, entitled Solitaire, the artist has framed isolated figures and individuals. The solitude of these characters is heightened by their presentation on the two central murals of the exhibition, created in situ by the artist. The first mural weaves through the rooms printed playing cards that feature the common characters of the game, but on their own– not mirrored as usual – against a broad green background: the suggestion of a grand solitaire game is formed by randomly displayed shuffled cards, printed on the wall by the artist.The second one presents the motif of an 18th-century sailing ship repeated and superimposed, creating the visual reverberation of a solitary vessel that, in each reproduction, reveals a mechanical stroke, that is nonetheless manually executed by the artist, who prints the drawing on the wall in sections.

The coming and going between the start of the Modern Era and the Present liberates in Billingham’s oeuvre, on the one hand, the condition of modernity itself: the ever growing and accelerating reproduction and circulation of images, the relativization of historical and mundane time. But on the other hand, this juxtaposition of different historical times, images and ways of making, uncovers the day to day wisdom that sustains satire and humor; always attached to the body. This single thread of body, humor and game crosses through Pompeiian murals, Rabelais novels and the satirical cartoons of XVIII century Britain but also through contemporary memes and Tiktok videos. 

Finally, Solitaire reminds us that in our solitude we contain the whole human race and that even though we are always surrounded by it we are always alone. This paradox, the base of the human condition, is transcended more often than not through humor and game in an ecumenical Solitaire game.

Pablo Arredondo Vera