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Paul Brandford's paintings toy with caricature and the cartoon in a traditional painterly style more akin to both Hogarth and Goya. This new body of paintings are snapshots from our time, mediated, consumed, digested and finally regurgitated. These paintings are as much about the media and its dissemination, its arguments and positions as they are about celebrity, the all consuming pervasiveness of our culture and the topical events which become news.
Brandford's paintings are often humorous and satirical a critique of the culture of celebrity, fame, infamy and its mediated portrayal. Many of his paintings are of the anti hero, those who maybe shouldn't be portrayed and are certainly not heroes. But his paintings have an acuity, a wit and a cutting satirical edge which slices through the rhetoric and lays bare the reality of the subject matter. These paintings explore the continual historicity of portraiture. Royalty, political leaders, Dictators and wannabe leaders question the fundamental of the celebratory portrait.
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