A most charming man: Charming Baker exhibition review
Artist Charming Baker seems to have a real buzz going at the moment and his current London show is a sell-out. But is it any good?
I first came across Charming’s work a couple of years ago when I saw a print of his Portrait of Estelle (Pink) work, a quirky image of a girl with a chicken head on a background of what looked like a piece of pinkish wallpaper your granny would be proud of. It was both beautifully drawn and truly disquieting.
These days Charming Baker produces large-scale canvases where whimsical images of furry animals and plump babies cohabit with bullet marks and a sense of impending doom. It is telling that Charming studied graphic design, and not fine arts, as his work borrows from the world of illustration and has a great immediacy and clarity of impact.
When I visited the exhibition in the rather badly lit and cold space provided by Mercer St studios, the paintings sparkled with humour, tenderness and despondency. A strange cocktail that somehow manages to ignite into a credible body of work. Charming titles his work with some lengthy pearls of wisdom such as ‘’One day we will reach a point where our future is all used up’’ and I found myself often as intrigued by them as I was by the works themselves.
Only the sculptures, bronze heads wearing golden animal masks, seemed to me not to match the success of the paintings. Maybe this was because the medium made it trickier for the artist to transfer his combination of wit and angst effectively as it did not allow him to use colours and backgrounds as effectively as the canvas does.
Interestingly Charming was in the room when I viewed his work. He was busy explaining the meaning of a couple of his paintings to a honking buyer, or art critic?, with grace and openness despite his interlocutor finding it necessary to speak at a volume usually reserved to army sergeants or market traders.
Maybe this is what is so appealing about Charming: the fact that he organises his own shows, does his own commentary and provides visitors with a nice big free catalogue of his work, thoughts and sketches.
My one misgiving about the artists is that beyond all the clever words and ironic statements, we know very little about some of the more personal elements of his work. The catalogue mentions in passing that Charming’s mother is represented as a lamb about to be run over by a train in his ‘’Knowing nothing is under-rated’’ painting. This is probably the only mention of the deeper meaning behind the clever jokes. Maybe Charming could let people a bit more inside his world and give more clues of what drives him. All in all, a great show by an unpretentious artist (that makes a change!!) who could be described as Banksy with pathos. You can view Charming Baker's show, Everything Must Go, at 16 Mercer St, Covent Garden, London until 31st July http://charmingbaker.com/
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