Falling Awake
Vienna-based photographer Anthony Gayton dwells in history through visually complex tales that fearlessly intertwine sacred symbols of mythology, Christian religion, art history iconology and superstition. Accompanied by imaginative, semantically ambiguous poems, Gayton’s stories of gym-shaped male beauties are full of allusions to Baroque and Renaissance paintings with a Victorian melancholic flair and a slight touch of Charleston glamour. Yet, apart from serving as a mere homage to the homoerotic art in history, Gayton’s visual poems challenge, by means of a subtle subversive sophistication, the way in which universal ethics and psychological genre codes have been visually filtered into the consciousness of generations.
It took Gayton more than two decades of apprenticeship to achieve his masterfully composed and highly stylized pictures. At the age of sixteen, he began a two-year art course to become a painter, but instead got blown awake by fashion photography. Back in the family house attic, he would use his sister as a model and then run to his darkroom trying to cut and paste negatives of unicorns… Then college years in London followed, and the first of many-to-come influential journeys to Italy. In 1993, Gayton settled down in Vienna, where he worked as assistant to the acclaimed photographer Andreas H. Bitesnich, learning the technical side of the job and how the industry works. It was not until the late nineties when he went back to a more personal work. After initial experiments with Photoshop cut and bits n dense mythological-like sequences, such as “Bacchanalia” (2003), Gayton’s distinctive style made its breakthrough in “The Angelus” (2004); a series based on poems from the early nineties about a love triangle and a perfect love overcoming social conventions. Now, it is all about “Falling Awake” (2007), where an unorthodox narrative of multiple semantic layers brings together bits of dreams, ghost stories and a castle, unfolding the story of a boy who finds true love in his dreams.
“The original idea came from thoughts I had about the real possibility or impossibility of finding one’s true love during their lifetime”, stresses Gayton. “Everything in life is reduced to chance. Maybe your true love lives in China! Maybe you have just crossed him on the street but nothing else happened!” Luckily, in “Falling Awake”, dreams make up for these reduced probabilities. Using as feedback the uncoded material that pops out of his last dreams in the morning, Gayton has managed to put the strings of his romantic story together, bringing love into the sphere of a ghostly after-death life.
Inspired by sources as diverse as the great masters of the past or early pigment photography, “Falling Awake” hints, more than ever before, towards Gayton’s mystic obsession with relocating religion to a homoerotic context, without actually subverting or changing anything, but revealing, instead, the infinite possibilities of seeing and interpreting. The floating Christ-like figure on the balcony, Bible passages and the eschatological belief in the destiny of the spirit coexist harmoniously with the secret world of English countryside superstitions. An example is the “Whisper” image, where the Mirror and the Apple are employed to transmit a message of self-revelation, according to the legend that claims that if you eat an apple or comb your hair looking in the mirror, you will see your true love over your shoulder.
Gayton explains his “twisted affair” with religion through his personal self-recognition as a brought and raised protestant in a small, conservative English town. “When I was young, I used to go to church. At the age of fifteen I deeply wished to be a Christian. I did a little pilgrimage in Exeter and bought myself a cross. A couple of weeks later I lost it on a school trip to a cave. For me at the time it was as a message from God; ‘I do not want you’ ”.
Being an outcast from God’s world expresses a rather general feeling in Gayton’s life, that of being an outsider. Back in university, in the eighties’ London, his work would simply not fit with the prevailing conformist documentary ethics. “Image manipulation was frowned upon. Our obligation was to recreate reality as it was. I was the only one who just hung pictures on the walls without adding huge amounts of explicatory texts”, explains Gayton. Later his mermaids and centaurs would become too arty for the fashion world and too fashionable for the galleries. The same goes for his work when viewed in homoerotic terms. “Obviously my pictures express a gay perspective but they are not just about a good male six-pack, neither are they exclusively for a gay public. On the contrary, most gay magazines would dismiss them as too romantic”, stresses Gayton.
Classically set and frontal in their majority, Gayton’s compositions create an apparently idyllic narrative space without evident iconological distortions. Still, though his universe could be anytime and anywhere, nothing in it is, as it seems. The archival quality of his large format digital pigment prints would disorientate even the most demanding photopurists as the expression of a frustrated painter. Gayton’s play with analogue and digital processing poses a question about the quest for veracity and authenticity, revealing the capacity of photography to encompass traditional media, creating a space of fake simulations where obvious provocation gives its place to subtle dissonances and multiple layers of ambiguity. According to Gayton, “contemporary photography is just stripping everything down. The more expressive it gets, the more immune the audience becomes”. As a response to this, his becomes an idealistically complex world of illusions, in which a critical posture to the dogmatic system of representations is developed from the inside. Too classical and pictorial to be shocking and offensive at a first sight, Gayton’s work demands full intellectual, censorial and emotional interaction with the spectator. Let us lift the curtains and reveal the silent emotional chaos that has always existed in the established narratives and representations. Gayton’s photography is a means towards unspoken tales and hidden revelations that can only take shape in the dreams of a Dead Romantic. His is -as the critic Edward Lucie-Smith put it down- “a photography for adults.”
All images: Anthony Gayton
Representing Gallery: MITO Barcelona
Text by Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved.
Published in Eyemazing, Issue 01-2008
Vienna-based photographer Anthony Gayton dwells in history through visually complex tales that fearlessly intertwine sacred symbols of mythology, Christian religion, art history iconology and superstition. Accompanied by imaginative, semantically ambiguous poems, Gayton’s stories of gym-shaped male beauties are full of allusions to Baroque and Renaissance paintings with a Victorian melancholic flair and a slight touch of Charleston glamour. Yet, apart from serving as a mere homage to the homoerotic art in history, Gayton’s visual poems challenge, by means of a subtle subversive sophistication, the way in which universal ethics and psychological genre codes have been visually filtered into the consciousness of generations.
It took Gayton more than two decades of apprenticeship to achieve his masterfully composed and highly stylized pictures. At the age of sixteen, he began a two-year art course to become a painter, but instead got blown awake by fashion photography. Back in the family house attic, he would use his sister as a model and then run to his darkroom trying to cut and paste negatives of unicorns… Then college years in London followed, and the first of many-to-come influential journeys to Italy. In 1993, Gayton settled down in Vienna, where he worked as assistant to the acclaimed photographer Andreas H. Bitesnich, learning the technical side of the job and how the industry works. It was not until the late nineties when he went back to a more personal work. After initial experiments with Photoshop cut and bits n dense mythological-like sequences, such as “Bacchanalia” (2003), Gayton’s distinctive style made its breakthrough in “The Angelus” (2004); a series based on poems from the early nineties about a love triangle and a perfect love overcoming social conventions. Now, it is all about “Falling Awake” (2007), where an unorthodox narrative of multiple semantic layers brings together bits of dreams, ghost stories and a castle, unfolding the story of a boy who finds true love in his dreams.
“The original idea came from thoughts I had about the real possibility or impossibility of finding one’s true love during their lifetime”, stresses Gayton. “Everything in life is reduced to chance. Maybe your true love lives in China! Maybe you have just crossed him on the street but nothing else happened!” Luckily, in “Falling Awake”, dreams make up for these reduced probabilities. Using as feedback the uncoded material that pops out of his last dreams in the morning, Gayton has managed to put the strings of his romantic story together, bringing love into the sphere of a ghostly after-death life.
Inspired by sources as diverse as the great masters of the past or early pigment photography, “Falling Awake” hints, more than ever before, towards Gayton’s mystic obsession with relocating religion to a homoerotic context, without actually subverting or changing anything, but revealing, instead, the infinite possibilities of seeing and interpreting. The floating Christ-like figure on the balcony, Bible passages and the eschatological belief in the destiny of the spirit coexist harmoniously with the secret world of English countryside superstitions. An example is the “Whisper” image, where the Mirror and the Apple are employed to transmit a message of self-revelation, according to the legend that claims that if you eat an apple or comb your hair looking in the mirror, you will see your true love over your shoulder.
Gayton explains his “twisted affair” with religion through his personal self-recognition as a brought and raised protestant in a small, conservative English town. “When I was young, I used to go to church. At the age of fifteen I deeply wished to be a Christian. I did a little pilgrimage in Exeter and bought myself a cross. A couple of weeks later I lost it on a school trip to a cave. For me at the time it was as a message from God; ‘I do not want you’ ”.
Being an outcast from God’s world expresses a rather general feeling in Gayton’s life, that of being an outsider. Back in university, in the eighties’ London, his work would simply not fit with the prevailing conformist documentary ethics. “Image manipulation was frowned upon. Our obligation was to recreate reality as it was. I was the only one who just hung pictures on the walls without adding huge amounts of explicatory texts”, explains Gayton. Later his mermaids and centaurs would become too arty for the fashion world and too fashionable for the galleries. The same goes for his work when viewed in homoerotic terms. “Obviously my pictures express a gay perspective but they are not just about a good male six-pack, neither are they exclusively for a gay public. On the contrary, most gay magazines would dismiss them as too romantic”, stresses Gayton.
Classically set and frontal in their majority, Gayton’s compositions create an apparently idyllic narrative space without evident iconological distortions. Still, though his universe could be anytime and anywhere, nothing in it is, as it seems. The archival quality of his large format digital pigment prints would disorientate even the most demanding photopurists as the expression of a frustrated painter. Gayton’s play with analogue and digital processing poses a question about the quest for veracity and authenticity, revealing the capacity of photography to encompass traditional media, creating a space of fake simulations where obvious provocation gives its place to subtle dissonances and multiple layers of ambiguity. According to Gayton, “contemporary photography is just stripping everything down. The more expressive it gets, the more immune the audience becomes”. As a response to this, his becomes an idealistically complex world of illusions, in which a critical posture to the dogmatic system of representations is developed from the inside. Too classical and pictorial to be shocking and offensive at a first sight, Gayton’s work demands full intellectual, censorial and emotional interaction with the spectator. Let us lift the curtains and reveal the silent emotional chaos that has always existed in the established narratives and representations. Gayton’s photography is a means towards unspoken tales and hidden revelations that can only take shape in the dreams of a Dead Romantic. His is -as the critic Edward Lucie-Smith put it down- “a photography for adults.”
All images: Anthony Gayton
Representing Gallery: MITO Barcelona
Text by Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved.
Published in Eyemazing, Issue 01-2008
