“Despite the overt use of faces as Machiko Edmondson’s 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, Edmondson’s 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, Edmondson 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 abolition of individuality realised through the pages of glossy magazines. Anything but a passive recipient of those images, Edmondson 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 Edmondson, 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, Edmondson’s 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 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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"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 other-worldly 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 object 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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