Patrick Caulfield
Patrick Caulfield's seemingly anonymous painting style is instantly recognisable. Although he disliked being identified with a particular art movement, he is often associated with British Pop Art because his subjects are often commercially produced or kitsch. However, unlike Pop Art he wasn't interested in social realism or social comment and nor was his subject matter obviously contemporary or overtly American. Instead, he chose subjects that were ambiguous both in tone and context, such as images taken from manuals or clichéd holiday destinations directly lifted from postcards. His paintings look like commercial advertising or a painting-by-numbers illustration because he removes all visible brush marks, limits his palette to bright bold colours in commercial gloss paint and surrounds his patches of flat colour with strong black outlines. Caulfield's painting style was in part a reaction to the highly personalised painting style of Abstract Expressionism, but he was also strongly influenced by Fernand Leger and the Cubist painter Juan Gris.
Caulfield's domestic interiors are often lifted directly from 1950s interior decorating magazines and they retain their original aspirational mood. Devoid of narrative, Caulfield nevertheless imbues each canvas with a powerful emotional register by suffusing them with a dominant saturated colour. Frequently melancholic, these interiors are always totally still and without a human presence except maybe for a light left on.
Many of his interior scenes also play with methods of portraying different forms, combinations and sources of light. He also incorporates trompe d'oeil and photorealistic elements in order to playfully explore the relationship between notions of reality, artifice and illusion. Caulfield was interested in showing how no one method of representation within an artwork can claim to be more or less 'real' than another. Interior with a Picture is a good example of one of Caulfield's interior scenes.
http://www.tate.org.uk/imap/imap2/pages/caulfield.html
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