Christopher Bond’s work by design is not easy to categorise. Confidently confused, abstract paintings mix with chaotic montages, light boxes made from discarded street signs, screen prints of faux institutional letters sit next to delicate drawings of beer cans, text rants and doodles.
Bond is a collector, a thief even, from the bins of East London sign shops and more poetically from memories of an eighties childhood and his present daily routine. All fragments taken from our visually saturated culture, through paint and sculpture he re-contextualises image/object creating splutters and gestures that belong in the realm of psychology, becoming abrupt comments in a beautifully seedy world.
Bond has a purist passion for colour, which provides a playful blanket for his panicked manifestations. Likewise he holds a love of language deeply routed in lyricism and expression. Inner landscapes of escapism are interrupted by ‘tongue in cheek’ devices, which create an absurd and light humoured playfulness that could be likened to the clarity and anxiety of a hangover.
This work resonates our undefined societal positioning gesturing towards a perplexed, self-aware agenda and having both an irreverence and affinity for its very existence.
Presenting over-egged puddings and under-cooked croissants Bond’s work welcomes the viewer into a psychological space of personal interpretation and re-interpretation, of dialogue and in a cathartic act urges us to look again when we walk down the street. Posing more questions than answers it presents a woolly, speculative agnosticism.
Christopher Bond gained is MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art & Design London in 2006 and his 1st Class BA also in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art Design in 2003. He continues to live and work in London.
