Wild Wild Wood And Other Drawings sees Coyle return to subject matter he has previously explored, namely crime scenes and pornography. What continues to interest Coyle in these images is their problematic claim on reality. Both fields provide excellent examples of a world anticipated by Jean Baudrillard in which these images of reality are themselves simulations. Their authenticity is a special effect. They are hyperreal rather than really real, as the distinction between reality and image has become effaced. As Baudrillard puts it “ we live everywhere in an aesthetic hallucination of the real”. Somehow these images are unable to express what lies within them. They seem to make more sense in the realm of art than in the domain of the real. For, to quote Gerhard Richter, “Photography has no reality, it is almost 100 % picture; and painting always has reality”. Interspersed among these images of sex and death are drawings based on images culled from the contemporary mediascape, of lifestyle and celebrity magazines, tabloids and holiday brochures
Coyle has treated his source material in a variety of different ways, both technically and symbolically. Most of the pencil drawings have been drawn over and over again until what is left is a barely legible, almost spectral presence. Some of the charcoal drawings allude to 17th & 18th-century landscape painting. ‘The Enchanted Castle’, a highly romantic view of a modern office-block at night, borrows its title from a painting by Claude. ‘Fete Gallante’ sees Watteau’s 18th century masque of flirtation and courtship transplanted to a nighttime gay cruising area in LA. ‘Petit Morte’ grafts art history’s most famous memento mori, the skull from Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’, onto a pencil drawing of a porn scene.
With most of the drawings Coyle has followed his previous approach, repeatedly drawing and erasing the image, providing the barest explanatory details, so that the drawing becomes a starting point for a personal narrative. These works pose open-ended questions about looking, at art, at porn. They speaks of desire, pleasure, and the commodification of sex and death. They speak of the nature of photography and its inadequacies, and of sensory overload in our voyeuristic and depthless culture.
