Studio Notes: The Last Days of Disco, Psychological Pandemic Landscapes

The Last Days of Disco (2021) Acrylic on canvas, Carl Gopalkrishnan

The Last Days of Disco (2021)

Just sharing two new painting. The first is in support of all our health workers. My father was a doctor who passed away of natural causes in 2018, and I just have this empathy for what health workers and their families are going through. I figured by now they have developed a very strong, dark sense of humour to survive the crushing workload we're dishing out to them. I'm sort of glad my Dad is not here now. Even in his 80s he'd try to help. So, this first painting is called The Last Days of Disco (2021) and is an acrylic on canvas. It's an imaginary ICU of our collective unconscious, beneath the chaos of the present live the mythologies we have created from our past. Our mistakes come from the past, are paid for in the present, and cannot be properly buried until the future.

This is a homage also to 70s Europop and disco anthems like Marc Cerrone and his classic dance hit Supernature, which to me during the early Covid19 lockdowns was really prophetic. The painting has references to an Egyptian God escorting the dead, our constantly changing attitudes to death throughout the Millennia from the gruesome to the spiritual, our internal monsters manifesting in the growth of the far-right, and Marilyn because, well, who wouldn’t want Marilyn dancing on your grave, especially since this painting is part of a theme across several canvases which I titled: Shadow Dancing. It is painting about our ecosystem fighting back.

Radio Killed The Video Star (2021)

My second painting below is a slightly more raw, painting titled: Radio Killed The Video Star. I totally re-wrote the statement. It started during our first lockdown when I imagined what it would be like to visit the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in the Australian Radio Quiet Zone WA (ARQZWA) in Western Australia. Sadly it’s a no-go zone for the public. But it made me begin looking at the outback landscape in a different way to the way artists normally do. I wanted to reclaim the Australian landscape to my own experience as a migrant. I wanted to bring my own ghosts. I didn’t want to experience it through other people’s minds, images or mythologies.

Radio Killed The Video Star, Acrylic on wooden board, 2022 Carl Gopalkrishnan

“Imaginatively set in the WA radio quiet zone landscape of Western Australia protecting the work of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), Radio Killed the Video Star brings a queer lens to the idea of a silent, isolated Mad Max-style world where viruses have invaded the planet as malevolent intelligent beings. Inspired by pulp fiction 80s soap operas, Joan Collins is called on by a desperate world on the brink of extinction to resurrect her iconic character Alexis Carrington and save the world.