ROBERT LANGE & GEORGE AYERS
Tiny and Shiny
How’s the saying go, “Don’t sweat the small stuff”? Well, if you’re Robert Lange and George Ayers, the small stuff is all you’re sweating leading into Shiny Stuff, their new two-man show opening April 5 at Robert Lange Studios in Charleston, South Carolina.
The show will feature a variety of things summed up best by one of Lange’s works: tiny and shiny. Lange’s work will feature wild animals shrunk and placed into silver bowls, as well as works like Bee Strong, which shows a normal-sized honeybee flying with a bear-shaped bottle of honey. “I’ve been painting shiny, reflective objects since senior year of high school when I first began to paint. For me, it was always the second painting that existed inside the reflective surface that was the most interesting,” Lange says. “Since then 20 years have passed, and I have tried to examine shiny surfaces from every nuanced angle I could think of. This new body of work hopes to showcase a wide range of diversity within the subject matter all the while promoting a state of levity and buoyancy.”
In The Jungle VIP, a phrase possibly borrowed from Disney’s version of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Lange paints an orangutan seated inside a silver cup, while
in Tiny and Shiny a tiger peers ominously from a bowl resting on top of a folded tablecloth with a magnificent pattern. Wonderfully, in both paintings Lange has painted himself in the reflections. “The bee is life-size in the painting, but the orangutan and tiger have been shrunk down. I initially made a painting of a miniature lion in 2009 because I wanted to see if the feeling about a specific animal would change based on scale,” he says. “Since then I have made many of these works and I always enjoy the way a person reacts to the scale shift. A person may be deathly afraid of a life-size Siberian tiger but when you shrink them down to 8 inches tall one can’t help but read the animal as endearing or adorable. I believe the effect of the painting is to help change the relationship between a person and the animal depicted, hopefully allowing for more empathy.”
For Ayers, the pairing with Lange is fitting. “I think Rob and myself both paint a lot of shiny
objects anyway so this duet show seems like a perfect fit. One probably tends to associate metallic objects with shiny, but there are plenty of foods that are quite reflective,” Ayers says. “Typically painting a shiny object is more about painting whatever the object is reflecting which is certainly fun. The food, however, has its own personality and, although the surface is slightly less perfect and the reflections more subdued, that quality tells its own story.”
Ayers’ works in the show include Olive, a portrait-like presentation of an olive skewered on a fork, and Candy Apple, which features glossy reflections that gives the candy a mouth-watering effect for the viewer. “Although I don’t consider myself a food artist it has definitely been my most common subject lately. Having been fortunate enough to dine at a few New York 3-Michelin star restaurants a few years back, I developed a passion and admiration for their craft. These chefs are true artists in every sense of the word,” he says. “Putting together a dish that is gorgeous to view as well as being the most incredible dinner you’ll ever be lucky enough to have is no small task. I find this to be inspirational and since my cooking skills are average at best I do my best to create some of that magic on the canvas.”
Shiny Stuff continues through April 27 in Charleston.