LIQUID PORTRAITS

The series announced their pop-propagandistic style, which tends to foreground clearly delineated subjects against brightly colored monochromatic backgrounds. This gesture, minimal as it might appear, suggest the strong interplay between image and text in the pair’s work, a strategy they have carried over in to their Liquid Portraits series.

Similar to their earlier Unparaleled Objectives works, this new series is bold and bright. Some of the portraits feel like a mash up of the pose and gestures of classical Dutch portraiture, The wished-for truth of Socialist Realism, and the synthetic worlds imagined by contemporary fashion photographers.

Something Grace Coddington said of Meat and Marcus’s photographs somehow resonates:' ‘Its very fakey, fakey, fakey. But that’s what it’s supposed to be.’Underlying the pair’s interest in color; excess and fakery is a strong critique of their adopted home. Simplistically, it highlights the mute tonalities of contemporary Middle Eastern art, which chafes against the pair’s own experience of color in the birth countries.

More Fundamentally, the pop-propagandistic idiom of their work is both a reproduction of and analysis of Qatar’s optimistic but unequal modernization drive.Text by Sean O’Toole (Extracted from Foam Talent Magazine 2014)