When the heterodox and icons meet

As these images were unsettling to so many, I've moved them so that you need to choose to read more to see them. There is an argument to be made for posting nothing that will offend those that read this blog. When I've posted in the past on clergy that have acted inappropriately with their parishioners, when "artists" turn the holy into the abominable, when I post about the FEMEN group, or other such unhappy moments it is always followed with the question: "Why did you even post this? Why did you give this more exposure than it deserves?" The answer to this is that I want this to be as much a place of discussion as it is one of publication.

So, why post about this man's work even if it is so foul to the eyes of Orthodox? Because it is happening, because we need to have a response when people do such things (e.g. that infamous New York art show complete with crosses in urine and worse), and because frankly I feel iconography separate from Orthodoxy is always in danger of leading people astray.

I apologize for those offended and hope that moving these pictures to the bottom of the post will make it so only those to wish to will have to look at them.

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From Chris Shaw Studio...

I’m not sure exactly where my fas­ci­na­tion with Madon­nas was born, but I’ve loved Icons of all kinds for a very long time.

As an artist I’m intrigued with the the way icons present their ideas – an eas­ily under­stood, blunt cen­tral image jux­ta­posed with deep sym­bol­ism and cryp­tic geo­met­ric foun­da­tions. Icons also have a rea­son for exist­ing, they are con­vey­ers of information.

The mod­ern icons I cre­ate also con­vey infor­ma­tion, it could be a sci­en­tific con­cept, a polit­i­cal state­ment, or a pop-culture ref­er­ence. Regard­less, each icon has a story and a rea­son for existing.

In this body of work I use the Madonna as the vehi­cle to lit­er­ally carry the ideas I’ve cho­sen to por­tray. The titles are straight for­ward. How­ever, under­ly­ing and obfus­cated by the image is a rigid geo­met­ric base, over which the Madonna icon is con­structed. The geom­e­try within this base is a rid­dle to deci­pher as are many of the sym­bols within.

I’ve mainly learned about hid­den geom­e­try and sym­bol­ism in art by decon­struct­ing an art­works com­po­si­tion, then research­ing what I find, some­thing I like to do for fun. Golden ratios, spi­rals, and fibonacci sequences are eas­ily found in many types of art, but espe­cially deeply woven into icons. How and why this geo­met­ric lan­guage was used fas­ci­nates me, it ulti­mately led to cre­at­ing my own icons with their own meanings.

Ortho­dox icons are a favorite style to appro­pri­ate. Real ones can often be quite abstract as the image becomes sub­servient to the geom­e­try used in the com­po­si­tion, I try to emu­late this ideal. The “Madonna of the Par­ti­cle” and the “Madonna of Dark Mat­ter” both con­cern the recently dis­cov­ered Higgs-Boson par­ti­cle. The geo­met­ric base used within each image con­tains nat­ural ratios and curves that ref­er­ence the sub-atomic par­ti­cle col­li­sions which led to the “God Particle’s” discovery.

West­ern icons, in par­tic­u­lar Ital­ian Madon­nas, are another deep influ­ence in my work. In the large trip­tych pan­els I’ve ref­er­enced and riffed on the art­work of Bellini, Bot­ti­celli and Ambro­gio de Pre­dis as base foun­da­tions for the images. Pre­dis’ “Girl with Cher­ries” (1495) has trans­formed into the “Madonna of Evo­lu­tion” now incor­po­rat­ing a both human and ape skull with repeat­ing helix motifs as both a “van­i­tas” por­trait and an icon. The “Madonna of the Mag­net” recon­fig­ures Bellini’s “Madonna and Child” (1480) into an icon devoted to my love of mag­nets. It is painted with iron and cop­per based pig­ments and com­posed using the sweep­ing curves found in mag­netic flux.

Each paint­ing com­mu­ni­cates its secrets in var­i­ous ways.

Chris Shaw
April, 2013

Images after the jump.