The Thousands

Let’s imagine for a moment that a Rubik’s cube, a vase of flowers, and Jean-Michel Basquiat have a threesome, and somehow manage to procreate. I’m going out on a limb here and putting forward the suggestion that their beautiful progeny would look something like Simon Degroot’s lush paintings.

Copy Repeat, Degroot’s forthcoming exhibition, re-examines traditional still life painting as a vehicle for exploring ideas about originality, representation and identity from within consumer ideology. Degroot consciously uses painting to critique the sea of commodity fetishisation that we find ourselves adrift in (the undeniable urge to buy ‘cool’ stuff to make us look ‘cool’). It’s clever, ironic, and frankly it’s cool.

The paintings combine hard-edged pixelated mosaics with expressive floral imagery, maintaining a delicate balance between the two. Now I can’t speak for everyone here, but I’m quite partial to delicious drips and seductive smudges in paintings and I particularly enjoy the gestural. It’s probably no surprise then that Degroot’s work made me drool once. Just a little. That person who uttered those famous last words, something about “painting being dead” would have to eat that whiney, nay-saying sentence baked in a humble pie if they saw Degroot’s work. BYO bib if, like me, you find it hard to control your reflexes when confronted with stunningly attractive paintings.