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拍品专文
‘My paintings,’ says Annie Kevans, ‘reflect my interests in power, manipulation and the role of the individual in inherited belief systems. It is important for me to examine the duality of truth and falsehood throughout my work, which I do by creating “portraits” which may or may not be based on real documentation. I believe that a person’s identity is not preset but is a shifting temporary construction and my work tries to question our verdicts on history and perceptions of intellectual solidity.’ This group of thirty oil paintings on paper depict the doe-eyed, rosy-cheeked faces of young boys. The palette is washed-out and delicate, the handling soft and tender. In these images of dreamy innocence, the titles come as a shock: Joseph Stalin, Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler, Germany. Mao Zedong, China. These are the faces (some actual, some invented) of dictators as children. Their titles are premonitions: none of these children are yet Stalin, Hitler, or Mao as we know them. Hitler’s soulful blue eyes are childishly vulnerable. Kevans plays on our weakness for the apparent innocence of the young face, drawing on the Victorian idealisation of childhood still very much in vogue when many of these men were young. Those eyes – invariably the darkest, most substantial part of each painting – draw instinctive sympathy; there’s a kitschy sentimentality to the paintings that runs deliberately at odds with the associations conjured by their titles. Frozen like this, these children might never amount to anything.