You may already be familiar with Jeremey Geddes‘ oil paintings, his ultra-realistic oil on linen works depict all manner of characters, however his most iconic must be his series of floating cosmonaut images, which in essence through their lack of obvious narrative leave the viewer ‘hanging’ in much the same space, intellectually, conceptually and emotionally, up on high.
There is a distance that all students of the arts soon discover, a space, a void, and this is where Geddes is most comfortable. On the most practical level it may exist between the viewer and object, or one art work and the next, but even more so, rather like photography, the visual arts in general ‘hold a moment’, intransigent or otherwise, for time immemorial.

Geddes crosses the line of reality and fictions with the ease that a child might leap from one side of a narrow stream to the other, except in this case rather than water, it is our collective consciousness that runs torrents through the visual landscape, for it is our media-fuelled and fictionalized imagination that he dutifully records and remonstrates in immaculate detail.

Many of the works may technically lend themselves to all manner of traditional painting styles, such as the early Dutch Masters and the Pre-Raphaelite movement, but in subject matter and composition I’d cite film as his Geddes’ main influence. The silver screen has done much to vicariously and simultaneously bring mankind together and pull them apart. These days we can culturally identify with fiction as deeply and closely as we do fact. Although in truth we have travelled no further than the Moon, in our collective psyche are implanted false memories of distant galaxies, alien races and battles on such a vast scale they would have easily expended the human race ten or even a hundred times over. Biologically we have regressed and progressed towards new races and old, genetic fears instilled by such scientific aberrations as the zombie genre, the dead rising and attacking the living is now a familiar fictional adage. Yet these influences, these machinations of imagination take root in our daily lives through the world they symbolically mirror.

Our world is over populated, yet there are more lonely and isolated individuals than ever before, this distance is a necessary evil in what would otherwise be an intolerably invasive world. We sacrifice the few for the entertainment of all, delving into the very being of celebrities, those who play the characters we feel our planet so deservedly needs and in antithesis those so monstrous we can relish in the bizarre practice of despising with literal glee and relish.

What I feel is represented in Geddes’ work is that space, the distance be it existential, psychological or physical we as human beings experience en masse and alone, we are lost, our prior dreams of world peace, the conquest of space, the perfection of the body, the extension of the mind, all falter in comparison to our hopes and wishes for an impossible future. We are still alone in the universe, we seek via programs such as SETI for some proof of intelligent life other than our own, for we need context, comparison, a relative scale beyond the incestuous discussions within our own clique that can be measured in a far greater pool of data, where for now only our dreams exist.

We still communicate with cumbersome sounds and marks, we cannot truly hear each others thoughts. Our individual understanding of the world around us is nothing more than a glimpse of the profundity of scale we still cannot dare to surmise. We are each lost in a malaise of compromise in recognition, truth and purpose. The scaled down visions of the impossible do little to allay the fear that none of us truly understand the whole story of Man, be it scientific, social, theosophical, or philosophical. Intellectually, from outside our realm of understanding, we are still barely more advanced than the apes from which we have evolved. There is no other species on earth that can intellectually consider it’s own death, and thus we have constructed social apparati to hold back this tide of fear and doubt, distractions beyond the realm of consequence, art and science to douse our fiery instincts, to calm the perplexing minutiae of existence itself.

We are a speck of dust in the universe, what we view as fundamental, as logical, is but another belief system embedded within a thousand others. We float through lives with little consequence, but for the recognition of those in the same circumstance, for we are mortal, yet our imagination is potentially infinite. Man must cling to his dreams, for almost always the firmament of knowledge, the grounds for understanding who and what we are will always give way to an even deeper plateau of contextual instinct and fear.

Much of modern society is held within the ethereal and temporal, it will decay and reduce to a byline of ancient history, as many preceding cultures have done so before us. Each year more languages are lost, more land is left uninhabitable, the seas rise as does the population count, government has intrinsically reduced to soft fascism, holding the line hard and fast in order to buoy up the spectacle of the global market. Yet one by one we gather what we can to hold dear our own unique representation of the life we lead together, documenting and recording every moment of our existence as if it is our last. We hold back the years and fears of what is to come, death for one, death for all. The precipice that we as a race now encroach upturns all notions of logic, this empire is crumbling but it is too painful to contemplate. Through whatever means possible we are all guilty of escaping our subsumed and cognitive reality, it is simply not enough anymore, if it was, we would have a shared identity that would in essence deplete the need for art, expression, scientific endeavour and the ideology of what may or may not happen in our man-made linear space/time continuum.

Geddes holds a moment, all rules fail to be realised, gravity has died, as has the temporal flux we obsess with a minutiae of detail and comparison. The floating astronaut provides no answers, his predicament is beyond our understanding, yet innately we see him transmute from superman to baby, the world is a womb and all of us are but seeds of what is to come. We are in essence the genetic fodder that may one day feed what will both understand and pity our precarious existence. If one were to learn the true nature of the universe, it would most likely rob them of all impetus for life as a human being. We are shaped by our limitations, and limited by the impossibility of understanding the infinite. Chance, chaos,the sequentiality of haphazard events, all contribute to the tome we cite as our true history. Yet within that tale, that myth of accomplishment are many clues, previously deemed insignificant details that show we always knew we were and are lost.

The instinct of survival, homoeostasis, is the reason why we are alive long enough to intellectually, emotionally and spiritually question our existence. A distinct polarity, at odds with the empiricism of religion and science, a fluid and random didactic that powers the engines of progress through the intolerance for the nonsensical. Those wise enough to understand the more they learn the less they know accept that there are no answers, answers are but the convolutions of previous lines of questioning, we exercise our right to exist in a seamless space of fantastical logic and logical fantasy. We float in space with little more than the comfort of ourselves, of our own kind, our agreement that we exist.

View more of Jeremy Geddes’ works at www.jeremygeddesart.com, where you can view his paintings and purchase limited edition prints. Jeremy was born in New Zealand, he has been published in several books and magazines, picking up a Spectrum Gold Award for his comic cover Doomed. He has illustrated one graphic novel in a collaboration with Gary Crew entitled ‘The Mystery of Eilean Mor‘.

This post is tagged astronaut, contemporary, cosmonaut, Jeremy Geddess, paintings, realism, surrealism, zombies