Richard Killeen

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In the late 1970s, Richard Killeen developed an innovative approach to painting. He painted appropriated image fragments on shapes cut from sheet aluminium, and nailed them to the wall in clusters, like butterflies pinned in a case. Called ‘cutouts’, they were collections of decontextualised images, divorced from any obvious, overarching logic or sense of purpose. The images were offered to the viewer for the pleasures of free association. Killeen said the cutouts were ‘democratic’, implying two things: firstly, that their compositions were non-hierarchical: the images they contained were created equal; secondly, that the format empowered viewers to make their own readings, denying any authoritative meaning emanating from the artist. The cutouts were quickly championed as an escape route from the tyranny of ‘the frame’, but they were never disruptively democratic, politically, or compositionally. With each work, the democracy always functioned within a limited stylistic range: a style-consensus. Further, the ‘cutouts’ pleasant shapes, harmonious colour schemes, curious images and non-threatening format offered a balanced, almost New Age, world view. Killeen promoted a utopia in which all things might be experienced as discrete, inviolable, autonomous—a world without hierarchy in which all particles would be granted their own personal space.

In the mid-1980s, Killeen was influenced by feminism. In works like Social Document (1984), he was no longer happy with viewers simply free-associating, he wanted to address the politics of the image. Now the cutout format proved recalcitrant; it left images so open to interpretation that it became hard to make a point. Occasionally, Killeen gave his works instructive titles and inscriptions, such as Language Is not Neutral and Time to Change the Greek Hero, prompting the viewer to read the images in a particular way, underlining the conclusions to draw. Ever since then, Killeen has been caught between two conflicting ethics, one to do with opening up freedoms for the reader, the other with addressing issues, speaking his mind.

Robert Leonard