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"Having to some extent released herself from the demanding strictures of working as Machiko Edmondson, the way is prepared for Cyan to make a fresh assessment...

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I have known Cyan Dee since her student days, when the work she produced on the MA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths laid the foundations for all that followed. She was then known as Machiko Edmondson, the name under which she first practised and exhibited, and whose developing work I have retained an ongoing familiarity with.

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Her labour-intensive renditions of faces are both cleverly conceived and strikingly executed. They are far larger than life and severely cropped to exclude peripheral details that would make them more identifiable, more ‘interesting’. Instead, the faces of the various models fill the canvas, so that the subject and the substrate conflate. The face of the subject is the face of the canvas; their skin is a skin of paint; their make-up is painted on just as these pictures are painted. Perhaps contrary to first impressions, these works turn out to be late-modern in their knowingness as paintings, while arguably also post-modern in their self-conscious use of simulacra. These images are not observed from life but come from secondary sources, idealised and artificial. Initially drawn from photographic reproductions in printed matter, they are now more usually scavenged from the internet.

 

As her alter ego, Cyan Dee, she continues many of these traits, but in general the scale is reduced, the execution is quicker and the application of paint looser. Cyan has a longstanding interest in music, and the music scene as much as the art scene initially led her to study in London. Having read her research proposal citing ‘fandom’ as a subject, I see it evidenced in the suite of Nick Cave paintings made at the end of her original period of study at Goldsmiths and exhibited as the centrepiece of her graduation show in 1995. The subjects of ‘fandom’ are largely accessed through a proliferation of images, carefully posed, costumed, made up, selected and probably manipulated. If seen in live performance, the artiste as presented to his or her fans from the stage is likely to project a persona unlike their ‘real’ self. All of this is further complicated by the fact that the fans themselves may now be making and distributing their own portraits via social media sites, using the same ‘improving’ technology deployed in mass media, and thereby entering the same hyper-real space as their idols, whom they may also seek to imitate. There is clearly a wealth of material here to add to her interest in idealisation and artifice, with the potential for Cyan to now build on and extend her existing work."

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John Hilliard (artist and emeritus professor in Fine Art, Slade, University College London)

 

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“Cyan Dee is an alter ego of Machiko Edmondson: another version of herself and another way of painting.

She calls these little works ‘impersonators’. It’s a parallel practice of portraiture once removed, as if there were some kind of stand-in, where resemblance is uncannily familiar but never quite what—or who—it seems.”

Andrew Renton (Professor of Curating at Goldsmiths University of London, ex director of Marlborough Contemporary)​​​

 

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“Despite the overt use of faces as her main image source, her work cannot be regarded as portraiture any more than baroque illustrations of the divine passion can. Rather, her paintings oscillate between desire and adoration, both in terms of the counter-culture idols she obsessively aspires to represent and the medium of painting itself. Small in scale, often dark, and always intimate, her new body of work serves as a quirky insight into the ability of images to turn apathy into anticipation and ordinariness into desirability. Fascinated by the conscious aura of music and style icons, she is a self-confessed Nick Cave addict. His image, alongside that of PJ Harvey, dominates the bulk of her new paintings. This is a tale of admiration and desire in the Lacanian sense of the word; one that is capable of reversing the process of the abolition of individuality realised through the pages of glossy magazines. Anything but a passive recipient of those images, she deconstructs them only to interpret them in her own idealised way. In fact, her manner is more that of an idolater than a teenage fan, with her paintings being not so much fetishistic in nature as reminiscent of religious iconography. For her, desire is not just the hunger for an image but also the hunger for the right image. It is through the ritual process of finding this image, which will form the outline of her work, that the artist actually replaces the narcissism of the subject with that of the painting, both as a medium and as an object. Given the artist’s affinity for depictions of popular culture, her almost modernist approach to the medium is certainly captivating. More than the visual equivalent of stalking, Her paintings are to be read as material tokens of desire, illustrating the process of—the passion for—illustration itself.”

 

A review by Irene Gerogianni for a solo exhibition titled "Is This Desire?" at "apartment" in Athens, which was featured in Contemporary Magazine Issue 84.

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​"Cyan Dee's A4-sized portraits of favourite pop musicians work deliberately within the humble realm of fan art, but elevate this form to a dazzling level. Painted in oils, with rare exceptions on the semi-opaque surface of mylar, to allow the white card behind them to exaggerate their luminosity, each is a declaration of love to a creative spirit who has impacted her life. Having declared her artistic intentions as a student at Goldsmiths in 1995 with her MFA degree show devoted to monumental portraits of her favourite musician, the great Nick Cave, and then moved on to her signature close-up portraits on an equally grand scale. The artist, also known as Machiko Edmondson, continues to focus on the often otherworldly humanity of her chosen subjects. These recent works on a much more intimate scale bring the viewer into direct confrontation with her (and our) heroes, depicted more or less life-sized with intensity and brilliance.
Working from found photographs that are available to anyone is a risky venture, especially when the photos are of people as famous and the objects of as much adulation as David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Brett Anderson, Marianne Faithfull, or Rowland S. Howard. Elizabeth Peyton is one of the rare painters who has successfully worked within this sphere at a level of great sophistication. All over the world, teenagers will have been attempting such portraits for decades with very mixed results. But Cyan transforms each image into a painterly rendition that is stamped indelibly with her bravura technique and her fascination with hair and piercing eyes as signifiers of personality. Her passion for the music shines through.”
 

Marco Livingstone (art historian, writer, and curator)

 

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