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The Folly of Man
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/the_folly_of_man/The Folly of Man
Michael Kerbow
Their Refinement Of The Decline
When a contemporary art website recently asked artist Michael Kerbow what one piece of art from the worlds collections he would like to own, he was quick with his answer: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel, with Bruegels The Triumph of Death a close second. Take a look at Kerbows work especially his three series Aberrations, Portents, and Transgressions and the influence is obvious. Like the sixteenth-century Flemish artist who also painted Icarus falling from the sky, Kerbow paints in-your-face allegories that illustrate the danger of humanitys hubris and our capacity for self-deception. Kerbow says his paintings try to reveal the dichotomy that may exist between what we desire and what we manifest. We say we want to live in paradise, but actually we inhabit an industrial purgatory.
The inhuman scale of industrial civilization fascinates and frustrates Kerbow, and hes at his best when showing how human technology can run amok. One painting depicts a spaghetti-like mass of packed freeways, suggesting that were going in circles or are lost in a maze of our own making. Another imagines a city so vast that it has become a kind of black hole consuming itself. A clump of automobiles is rendered as a beehive, a symbol of societys swarm-mind. In the sardonically titled Their Refinement of the Decline, a very Brueghel-looking tower of pipes and smokestacks looms over the city below. The point of the fable is clear. We build, we shape, we create and then we end up being swallowed by our own creations.
Compulsive Actions
Theres nothing subtle about Kerbows canvases; a painting of an ominous open pit mine, for example, is titled Fools Gold. Perhaps the obviousness is part of the message. By now the gargantuan scale of human ambition has become so darkly comical so clearly self-defeating that theres no sense in making fun of it stealthily. If youre going to satirize the ginormous overreach of our industrial society, you have to go big and bold yourself.
Kerbow is plain about his intentions. My painting portrays the folly of man, he says. We seem to be in an orgiastic race, digging ever deeper, without awareness of how unsustainable this rate of consumption is. With a smirk and a nudge a careful combination of bemusement and outrage Kerbows paintings are helping to raise a notch higher the awareness of our predicament.
Hive
Michael Kerbows work has been exhibited at galleries throughout North America. Some of his paintings will appear in a multi-artist show, Reimagining Progress, at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California through September 4. You can view more of his work at www.michaelkerbow.com.
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The Folly of Man (Original Post)
babylonsister
Jul 2014
OP
byronius
(7,394 posts)1. Excellent post.
Louisiana1976
(3,962 posts)2. Interesting paintings.