This sneak preview of Neurotic Realism: Part One, opening imminently at the Saatchi Gallery in north London, might leave you on edge. Charles Saatchi’s latest taste-maker as reviewed in the Observer of 10 January 1999, includes an ‘enchanting rubbish dump’ of wires, ash and tin cans by Tomoko Takahashi. The artist is asleep among the rubble, ‘like Tilda Swinton at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1995, making an exhibition of herself.’
Meanwhile, Paul Smith takes all the parts in his large-as-life photographs of himself – an everyman of a bloke, boozing it up with the lads, or a soldier shooting a deserter. ‘It’s hard to be a man in the late-20th century’ is the message of these ‘pseudo-documentary commentaries on modern life.’
Life is less hard if you are one of Saatchi’s chosen. ‘Nobody had heard of us five before he came along,’ says painter Martin Maloney, one of the artists whose art fitted the brand name ‘that precedes the product – a seductive ism dreamed up not by the artists in the show but by the wealthy collector/dealer/patron and dictator of art-fashion Charles Saatchi.’
Fortuitously, Maloney finds himself identifying with the neuroticism label his patron has stuck on him. ‘The 80s,’ he tells Nicci Gerrard, ‘were about perfection and ease, shoulder pads, money, Dynasty and Dallas, life sucks. Nineties art is full of confession, the admission of inadequacy, quirkiness, dreaminess, the fallibility of us all.’
On one canvas, Maloney’s big pink cartoon characters are having a gay orgy, and so are Steven Gontarski’s ‘repellent models, made of stitched plastic… Their pale plastic limbs fuse and mutate. It’s like wild sex taking place on a different planet: Planet Tomorrow.’
It’s food for thought, too, writes Gerard. ‘Ears are pink semicircles with dots in the middle. He paints eyebrows the way I used to, before I was told to give up art,’ observes Gerrard, ‘thick, straight and abrupt above mad staring eyes. We’ve had the end-of-history history; is this friendly massacre of perspective and portraiture, this botched realism, the end-of-art art?’ Or just more product, more shock of the new?’
