Monsters can be especially potent symbols to the uneducated. In the Middle Ages, educated monks filled their manuscripts with dazzling images that demonized foreigners, denigrated women and idealized piety. All admirably suited a male clergy. Before condescending about those times, it is worth recognising our modern infatuations – Star Wars and video games.
Prescience is a word often associated with Bayrle. In his first job in textiles, he realized that large images could be created using mass repetition of a small image. His “superform” style resulted and it resonates strongly in our digital age. “I believe in total individualism, even in the largest mass. I think that’s the richness of art, to define this singularity in the mass.”
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is not to everyone’s taste. These artists wanted to overturn Victorian England’s stodgy art with an aesthetic that emphasized colour and idealized the past. They, and their swooning damsels, now look anachronistic but they were a small step toward modernism. And they have, as one critic observes, “an armour-plated niche in the English imagination”.