Edgar Gambin

Rembar Gallery Exhibition

BY MATEUSZ BUCZKO

The artwork of Edgar Gambin has a lustre and vitality that gives it
instant visual appeal; the impact of the image rushes to your head like
a shot of absinth and leaves behind a lingering sensation of curiousity
and wonder. It sets something humming in your mind, compelling
you to look closer into the picture, drink it in deeply, and reflect on its
message and atmosphere. Gambin’s paintings are such that they
provide as much enjoyment for the layperson as for the art
connoisseur; his images immediately capture the imagination and set
it alight with the vibrant and fantastical flames of surrealism. Says
Gambin, “If I can manage to keep the viewer more than five minutes
in front of my painting then I must say that I have accomplished
something.” He rarely fails to do so.
Gambin’s dexterity at visual portrayal is in itself impressive. His
paintings abound in vivid colours, rich textures and a remarkable
level of detail; like his surrealist predecessor Salvador Dali, Gambin
paints in a glossy, highly realistic style that allows him to transfer to
canvas in minute detail the marvelous visions inside his head. His
textures morph and mingle; the vegetational and anthropological
fuse; often the very landscape itself feels organic: immersed in his
artwork, the viewer is filled with the sense that the world with all its
flora and fauna is positively buzzing with life; sometimes gently, other
times with great energy. Everything – the trees, birds, people,
mountains – form an integral part of the picture’s composition and its
overall feel and meaning. Yet Gambin’s paintings are never arduous
panoramas or ambiguous, over-loaded spectacles: in their lucidity
and simplicity, Gambin’s images are immediately eye-catching and
easily comprehensible, their various, often meticulously detailed
segments – although worthy of being examined alone, as descriptive
support passages for the broader pictorial poem – all coming together
to form a brilliantly vivid and seamless unification when absorbed as
a whole. In a striking cocktail of colours, textures and layers, the
painting’s scrupulously crafted visuals amalgamate to give the viewer
a unique sense of the real and the fantastical masterfully fused
together.
Clearly, Gambin’s work is fantastical and surrealist:
“Surrealism,” he says, “helps me to express myself.” It allows Gambin,
as a visual artist, to objectify the abstract and make the visually
intangible tangible; like Dali and Magritte before him, Gambin
develops concrete images which then serve to signify a thought or
feeling. The “organic sponge” of Gambin’s mind is a vast treasure cave
full of visual allegories; his paintings depict a magical yet physically
tangible world that’s strewn with exquisite symbols and signs, set
onto the canvas like jewels set into a ring. Because of his avid
surrealistic streak, Gambin’s paintings often seem like a dream or
hallucination crystallized at its crucial moment and transferred
permanently and flawlessly onto canvas. The influence of Dali in this
respect is apparent; however Gambin’s influences are many and his
greatest debt is to “the first surrealist”, Hieronymous Bosch. His
earlier paintings, published in his book ‘Surrealistic Voices on Paper’,
abound in bizarre, intricate figures reminiscent of Bosch, set in stark,
often mountainous landscapes and suffused in a strangely familiar yet
otherworldly ambience. But although one can detect elements of his
surrealist predecessors, Gambin’s work has a strong, distinct and
decidedly unique flavour: a lucid, polished style of painting servicing
the surrealistic communication of eye-catching and thought-
provoking content – the emphasis being firmly on the latter. As
Gambin puts it, “I like not only to animate the image but also to
arouse curiousity, where the impact is more on the message rather
than just the skill to paint.”
Gambin does not rely exclusively on surrealism for inspiration
and mode of expression; his work draws on many centuries of art
history with a great admiration for and knowledge of the Old Masters,
particularly Caravaggio and Rembrandt. From their paintings,
Gambin says, “I can say that I have absorbed some quite helpful
artistic intuition, to which I feel greatly obliged, so much so as to
sometimes include them in my works.” Gambin likes to incorporate
ideas and specific images from the Old Masters – which we as a
collective have absorbed into our cultural subconscious – and present
them anew in his own personal and highly original context. By doing
so, Gambin delves into our artistic subconscious and arouses a
tingling of déjà vu: by performing creative surgery on classical art
under the brightly coloured lights of surrealism, he makes it relevant
and fresh for a modern-day audience. Gambin also likes to draw
subject matter from history in general: “I like to travel through my
mental time-machine and search for that particular historical event
from which I can morally learn, and express my interpretations on
canvas.” By going back in time, Gambin can see where an event or
lesson learned has manifested itself before, and, by signifying it
visually in his artwork, pass onto the viewer a message or moral from
the past: again, incorporating the historical into the contemporary to
make a comment on our present condition.
So behind his elaborately detailed and sophisticated imagery, at
the heart of much of Gambin’s work is a powerful statement on the
state of the world, be it environmental, political, cultural or
otherwise. ‘Every picture tells a story’ is one of the guiding principles
of Gambin’s art: “this,” he says, “is how I am using the skill of
painting.” One subject he finds particularly fascinating is the mass
commercialism with which we are being constantly saturated. Many
of his recent paintings – through the use of clever, boldly animated
symbols and characters – make patent allusions to the infectious
spread and corrupting effects of this bloated, glittering monster.
Again, simple iconography is used to maximum effect, often
mirroring the massive plethora of signs and logos in the real world of
mass commercialism. ‘Last Supper’, for example, contains this and
several other elements characteristic of Gambin. The title itself serves
to connect the painting to the art past – the theme of the Last Supper
has been covered by dozens of artists, including Caravaggio – but
here it is given, as is typical of Gambin, a new and non-religious
focus. In his rendition of the theme, the world has shrunk to such an
extent as to fit inside an eggcup; staring at it, disturbed and
bewildered, are many of the people responsible: the militarists, the
commercial fast-food outlets, all made identifiable by their symbolic
headwear. They clamour round the globe like the Apostles around
Jesus, yet the world – though tiny and fragile by now, and still
burdened by the presence of the guilty – continues to glow brightly;
an indication, perhaps, by Gambin that there is still hope for the
future.
For all his commentary on the environment and humanity,
Gambin stresses that he is not a teacher – “I am not saying something
is right or wrong” – but that he is simply a moral observer, employing
the vivid imagery of surrealism to show us the world through his
unique vision. By reviving past events and images and recasting them
into a striking surrealist pictograph, Gambin visually conveys to the
viewer a moral statement about our world that is mentally accessible
and, as often as not, sugared with animated humour. Says Gambin,
“If we are meant to learn from history how to live in a better world,
then morality is one of the tools which I like to use as a brush to paint
the picture in the individual’s mind.” His work offers insight into a
world which we frequently look at but, for all its trivial jumble and
commercial glamour, do not really see. Through his striking visuals,
with their concretely realistic depiction and powerful imaginative
pull, Gambin breaks through the plastic shell of artificiality and
switches off all the neon lights, returning to us the authentic vibe of
nature and humanity, exposing to us the septic wounds inflicted by
modern man but, also, revealing to us subtle beauties and hidden
connections that we never noticed before: tiny gems scattered
throughout the vast sand dunes of the world, perceptible only to the
eyes of an artist. Gambin utilizes the cartoonist’s skill of clean,
effective animation, combines it with the poet’s talent of representing
the big and the abstract with a succinct and tangible allegory, to bring
us gracefully and surrealistically through his artwork to mind-
opening realizations. His work, then, is a shining contemporary
example of the truth of Picasso’s statement, that “Art is not truth; art
is a lie that makes us realize truth.”