The Less than Familiar Cezanne

Cathy Lomax takes another look at Cezanne's paintings

 

I find it hard to look at Cezanne landscapes and still lives. All those apples, oranges, green fields, and blue skies merge into what has become a horrible cliché. I have seen them so often my eyes are bored. I know this is sacrilege and that Cezanne is a genius, but over-exposure can be a terrible thing. So it was with little excitement that I went to see the latest iteration of the Cezanne blockbuster at Tate Modern, and I was only there because as a Tate member it was free.

Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair, c.1877, oi on canvas

 

What I discovered is that I love his portraits. The hints of smudgy red, the pleasingly undetailed grumpy faces of his models shadowed in blues and greens. Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair, 1877 is a stunning painting. The complete lack of consideration for the humanity of Mme Cezanne who is merely part of the composition is fascinating – the blue bow, the greens in her striped skirt, the enveloping red of the armchair, the checkerboard shadows on her face, the gold green of the wall – all are perfectly balanced. I have seen Madame Cezanne before, notably at a show of Cezanne portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in 2018, but some of the other works with figures are new to me. For instance The Murder (which comes with a trigger warning) which shows two men violently attacking the prone body of a women, the limbs of one of the murderers are brightly illuminated against a subfusc deep blue/green sky. It’s dark and nasty, more Manet than Cezanne. 

The Murder, 1870, oil on canvas

The portrait of Black Academie Suisse model Scipio (which was owned by Monet) is, unlike Mme Cezanne, bathed in humanity. The caption describes how Cezanne would have been familiar with debates around enslavement, and it’s easy to read the seeming exhausted Scipio, his long lean back turned out as he rests his weary head against his arm, as a political comment. At a quick glance it would be easy to mistake this painting for one of Lynette Yiadom Boakye’s enigmatic portraits of fictitious Black subjects. 

Scipio, 1867

Alongside this masterful spare portrait are some fussy small works depicting boxy female nudes. The most interesting of these The Eternal Feminine, 1877, has a loosely painted women, with red blobs for eyes, lying naked on a bed, surrounded by men – there could be photographers amongst the crowd, but a bit of research reveals them as writers, lawyers, and a painter. 

The Eternal Feminine, c.1877, oil on canvas

My favourite works are two versions of Portrait of the Artist’s Son. The first from 1880 shows the boy against a background of Cezanne’s characteristic undulating blue scrubbed with swatches of green. This colour is reflected in the shadows on the face. The rather lumpish shape of the figure is balanced by the flattened curved top of an armchair which is rendered in shades of aubergine. 

Portrait of the Artist's Son, 1880, oil on canvas

The second Portrait of the Artist’s Son, 1881-2, is unfinished. The boy’s head is tilted towards the left, his eyelids lowered. The dark blue/grey background is scratchy, and the whitish primer shows through. Either side of the head are untidy patches of aubergine/brown which recede to allow the face to stand out. The patchwork of colours that make the face are comprised (in common with other Cezanne works) of short diagonal brush strokes. The portrait is tender and moving. 

Portrait of the Artist's Son, 1881-2, oil on canvas

All the works I have described are hung on a brownish/purple wall – a colour snatched from Cezanne’s use of a similar aubergine-like tone in the paintings of his son. And it works beautifully.

 

I guess the moral is to look rather than assume you know an artist’s work! 

Cathy Lomax

January 2023

Cezanne

Tate Modern, London

until 12 March 2023

A Darkling Dive into Dystopian DIY Remembrance

Cathy Lomax and Alex Michon are haunted by the art and socio-political British culture (and disappointed by the omissions) in The Horror Show! at Somerset House.

Leigh Bowery, Hooded Cape Ensemble, 1988

In the week in which the death of Terry Hall of The Specials was announced, we went off to see The Horror Show! at Somerset House. Billed as a ‘Twisted Tale of Modern Britain', this blockbuster of a show explores how ‘ideas rooted in horror have informed the last 50 years of creative rebellion’, and there is a lot to absorb in this multi-layered ghost train ride of shapeshifting schlock-horror aesthetics. From the now familiar dernier cri of punk to the darkly fantastical works of 2019 Turner Prize winner Tai Shani; ghosts, ghouls, mysticism, and mayhem feature as a continuing rebellious thread throughout various landscapes of the dark re-imaginings of artistic psyches. 

Tai Shani, The Neon Hieroglyph, 2021

So here we have punk icon Jordan, painted by the underrepresented 70s painter and Duggie Fields contemporary Luciana Marinez, next to a Diamond Dog Bowie. Elsewhere there is a wall of large-scale images of Bat Cave clubsters in their gothy new romantic get ups, and a succession of outrageously attired drag artists sashaying down the stairs in Dick Jewell’s film Descending a Staircase which was shot at the seminal Kinky Gerlinky club night. 

Luciana Martinez de la Rosa, Jordan, 1977, pastel on board

 

The show is in three parts, Monster, Ghost and Witch. Monster is the punky, gothy, drag queeny, Leigh Bowery section. Ghost, as the gallery blurb states, ‘marks the collapse of hyperinflated 80s culture… defining a turning point in time between the dawn of a digital age of faceless audiences and invisible cyber wars’. So this is where Tricky’s trip hop meets the situationist sub-texts of Laura Grace Ford who reimagines London as a haunted house in her large-scale installation. Witch, the exhibition’s final act, celebrates the emergence of a younger generation often placing their work alongside their antecedents –Juno Calypso, for instance, is offset by Jane Arden. Each section is introduced by panels of engaging text which underscore the work with pertinent sociopolitical and metaphysical musings.

Juno Calypso, A Dream in Green, 2015

Jane Arden, Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven poster, 1970-71, designed by Alan Aldridge

 

However as is so often the case in an ambitious show of this size there are shortcomings and omissions, and the interesting countercultural perspective was, for us, almost inevitably haunted by the phantoms of those who were not featured. We particularly missed the visceral multi-faceted work of Delaine Le Bas whose outsider perspective has often called out racism, hierarchy, and refugee and women shaming. The same applies to the horror-inflected films and performances of Paul Kindersley, with their current-day queer eye. And surely the very British DIY filmmaker Andrew Kotting, whose films include Diseased and Disorderly and Their Rancid Words Stagnate Our Ponds, would have been a perfect fit. As would something of the English art folk horror investigated by Michael Bracewell in the The Dark Monarch, a show he co-curated at Tate St Ives in 2009.

 

It is obvious that the curators worked hard to create a non-hierarchical overview of the influence of spooky stuff to scare the nation. But the bones of those skeletons still left in the unopened cupboard continued to rattle around our brains and as we exited the gift shop we couldn’t help but think of Terry Hall’s plaintive voice singing ‘this town is coming like a ghost town’… a line that links the now and then so perfectly but like the majority of post-punk was sadly absent from the gallery.

Cathy Lomax & Alex Michon, 2022

Entrance to The Horror Show! at Somerset House 

The Horror Show!

Somerset House, London

27 October 2022 - 19 February 2023

 

Feelings For Fenella

Alex Michon visits an exhibition of paintings of the British actress Fenella Fielding and finds herself in a thoughtful frame of mind.

 

Contemplative – that was the curious feeling that overcame me when I visited Fenella Fielding: Actress, an exhibition of paintings at Gallery 286. Fielding, who is maybe best known for her role in Carry On Screaming! (1966), was also a serious actress with a deep husky voice and sensual demeanour. In the exhibition Fielding stares out at the viewer from a variety of portraits by the artists, Natalie Dowse, Sal Jones, Cathy Lomax, Jeanette Watkins and Fionn Wilson (who was also the show’s curator). Each of the artists had captured a different fascinating facet of Fenella in all her 1960s film star glamour. It was therefore disconcerting that I should feel contemplative. It was as if the paintings were thinking at me! Or perhaps it was that the actress was trying to reveal some unknown secret from her past through paint. 

Natalie Dowse, Do You Mind If I Smoke 1, 2021, oil on linen, 40x40cm

 

Natalie Dowse’s dreamy tight closeups are enigmatic and sort of sorrowful. I read in the show notes that Dowse played an audio copy of the Fielding’s book Do you Mind if I smoke? over and over again whilst she was painting. Ah and there it is! Dowse describes this as ‘a contemplative experience’. So perhaps I have inadvertently picked up on this at the show.

Sal Jones, Devastating Darling, 2021, oil on canvas, 60x50cm

Sal Jones writes that she had ‘wanted to paint (Fenella’s) voice’ – her presence, her humour and style.  In Devastating Darling she has used a montage of images of the actress infused with the glamour of 1960s fashion. The added text with its tongue in cheek humour captures the effervescent nature of Fenella as we would like to remember her, all high camp and knowing sexiness. However in amongst the glamour, Jones has included typical 1960s ‘hospital colours’ and as she writes ‘bed textiles’, as some of the images are taken from the film Doctor in Clover. I love the idea of ‘hospital colours’ and ‘bed textiles’ as they summon up all the slap and tickle, of the hospital Carry Ons which serve as incongruous signifiers of a heartfelt socialist dream of a fully funded idealistic Nation Health Service.

Cathy Lomax, Shadow, 2020, oil on linen 40x60cm

Cathy Lomax’s portraits are inspired by two inspirational visits to Fielding’s flat where Lomax was struck by the actress’s vast collection off wigs and makeup products particularly numerous boxes of false lashes. Lomax used the makeup as the starting point ‘layering images, just as makeup is layered on the face’. In Shadow, the fake eyelashes are particularly prominent, a flesh-coloured circle highlights the eye, an eyeshadow palette has become a searchlight on Fenella’s face. Her melancholic side gaze belying the performative made-up-ness of, as Lomax states, ‘actorly femininity’. Fenella does not look at us, instead she looks to the side, as if weary of masquerading. Here the actress looks as if she is longing to be in one of those Russian plays where everyone goes off to the country and is very bored! 

Jeanette Watkins, A Day With Cecil Beaton, Ready or Not, 2022, linen on cradled panel, 30x30cm

 

Jeanette Watkins has painted the actress from a society photograph taken by Cecil Beaton. Her Fenella is the least glamorous. Fenella peeps from behind the frame of her arms which are covering her head. The tones of the painting are muted and subtle and it seems to catch Fenella off guard, un-actressy. There is a touch Bloomsbury intelligentsia about the portrait and it perhaps hints at a more serious side.

Fionn Wilson, Fenella as Collette 1970, 2022, heavy body acrylic on canvas, 60x50cm

Fionn Wilson’s portraits are the most theatrical. Momentary vignettes that are powerful and dynamic. In one Fenella stares out from the painting wearing a black and white Pierrot-like spotty collar. She is holding an old-fashioned phone, her face is framed by her lustrous black hair, her thick black lashes circle her troubled eyes. The painting is like a silent mime, with Fenella as a trouble pierrette enacting a tragedy we can only imagine.

Alex Michon

 

 

Fenella Fielding: Actress 

Gallery 286, 286 Earl’s Court Rd, London SW5

9 November – 18 December 2022

 

Atmospheric touches were given in flax

A Dreamy summertime visit to see Lewis Brander's haptic skyscape paintings

Tell me about the Athenian sky

 

It is pure and wide. So blue it almost scares me.

 

[sublime]

 

With clouds placed to laugh at us. They make us believe we are not alone.

 

---

 

My own memories of Greece (Athens and Majorca) are foggy. Years have passed since fun work and post-teen trips, so I cast an eye to my Insta archive hoping to conjure some hazy rememberings. Some abstract form found in the recesses of my recollection. But nothing much appears. 

 

Estelle, my Athenian runaway, tell me about the Athenian sky [please]. 

 

As wafts of dust drift on the wind, big city meets sky and makes it it's own. 

It's puzzling how this big city is made by yet holds the sky. 

 

There is grace in this touch:

 Matter caressing/caressed by sky, 

by blue, recollections taking form in oily washes. 

No slick sheen. 

It's hazy, it's haptic.

 

The Athenian sky, framed by olive branches and TV antenna, by the walls of an ancient theatre and by clothes drying in the open.

 

Framed, not fixed, not captured.

 

Evacuated, transparent, invisible. So whole.

Lewis Brander, Vardaxoglou Gallery, installation view.

Lewis Brander at Vardaxoglou Gallery, brings together a range of humble skyscapes - some of which gesture to some earthly place beneath - completed by the artist over the last two to three years. Bare of any frivolous neo- or classical referents, Brander’s skies arrive, in their close box frames, as gestural washes of pigment, as memory traces caressed into visible recollection by board, linen, flax. The earthly tone used in each scape do not describe nor define a place as such. Rather, these subtle swells of oil paint convey the artist's own recollection of times spent beneath and in awe of the blue through pink skies of Greece and London. Echoing the olive branches and TV antenna which frame that 'pure and wide [...] excavated, transparent, invisible' expanse, 'so blue' it evokes some sense of fearful sublimity, these two geographic masses provide the earthly hands that hold Brander’s memories, supporting their painterly life. 

 

As a lover of the haptic - of the affective touch and hold allowed for in the most capacious of artworks - I am drawn to the paintings included in this exhibition where some illusionary opacity collapses. That is, where the division between sky and city (or) landscape dissolves; where the horizons of medium and support, as well as body and space, blur through improvisational grace. Variations of Light (mid summer), a pearl-toned window marred with smudges of oil that bleed and breathe into one another, is just one example where the material supports of Bander’s compositions jam their way into their paintings space, bringing with their intrusion an affective energy so loosely bound and unbound, here, in the dimpled grain of the creamy flax. 

Lewis Brander, Variations of Light (mid summer), 2019-2021, oil on flax, 27 x 32cm

The way in which Variations of Light’s backing surface holds Brander’s thin layers of oil not only gives the painting a new sense of physicality but imbues the scene with a sense of movement. It is as if a soft summer breeze has just swept some ancient Athenian sand into the square space in Soho from where I write with (borrowed) memories about the sky in its near and distant apparitions, feeling not alone.

 

 

Toby Üpson 

with thanks to Estelle Renaud for her generous input

 

 

Lewis Brander 
Vardaxoglou Gallery, London 

13 July – 13 August 2022

Deja Viewing

Alex Michon visits the seaside to see an exhibition that references the jubilee celebrations and finds herself doing the time warp again! 

 

So, with the Union Jack bunting beginning to fray and the gimcrack, knick-knackery gathering rust in the dusty corners of the souvenir stores, it’s time to look back on the jubilee-ing hoopla with a wry and discerning eye.

 

This is exactly what the exhibition Off With Their Heads attempted to do at the Don't Walk Walk Gallery in Deal. In keeping with its seaside location, many of the works on show featured affectionate end-of-the pier comedic elements. Two prints entitled Acid Reign by Neil Kelly and Cheer Up Love by Kelda Storm, with their rave and punk culture aesthetics served as irreverent antidotes to the forelock-tugging, cream tea-ing of the official celebrations.

Neil Kelly, Acid Reign, 2022, limited edition print on William Turner paper

 

Irreverence appears to be woven into Don’t Walk Walk’s walls considering that two of Britain’s most iconoclastic comedians, namely Vic Reeves and Noel Fielding, regularly choose to exhibit here. Fielding presented a series of affectionate oil on stick drawings of her majesty including: The Queen on the Moon, The Queen Riding her Pet Flamingo Donovan and Little Queenie (showing a now familiar diminutive version of her majesty standing next to a rather large guardsman). Jim Moir (aka Vick Reeves), whimsical as ever, showed an original watercolour of Queen Victoria having a Paint Ball Experience. Certainly nothing to frighten Liz’s adored horses here!

Noel Fielding, Queen on the Moon, 2022, oil stick on paper, 42x29cm

Fabienne Jenny Jacquet’s series of six oil paintings entitled Queens Head I-VI were some of the most engaging works in the show. Jacquet’s over embellished thickly painted portraits did not specifically reference the all too familiar image of the queen herself. Rather they stood in as queen manqués, with only Queen III having a vague resemblance to Elizabeth II. With their colourful top-heavy hairstyles resplendent with what appear to be paint rolls of flowers, their ornate drop earrings and grimacing smiles, they brought to mind ambiguous 18th Century grotesques. These portraits, replaying a painterly historicity reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, not only hinted at the darker side of monarchy but, as the faces got increasing obliterated by paint in each subsequent iteration, they also appeared to comment on the constant rehashing of queenly reproductions.

Fabienne Jenny Jacquet, Queens Head VI, III, II, 2022, oil on paper, 41x33cm

Elsewhere in the exhibition several works took a broader view of the subject to include aspects of British Culture. Neil Kelly’s melancholic painting Shit Picnic recalls a typical day remembered from the artist’s childhood of a picnic embarked on during a gloomy British summers day with a pylon standing in for a tree and a desolate blanket laid out ready for the festivities to begin. Not so much of a lovely jaunt in a green and pleasant land as a cheap holiday on the outskirts of town. This idea is further explored in Vanessa Smith’s Farewell to this Lands Cheerless Marshes. Smith is well known for her paintings of uninhabited interiors, imbued with an eerie tension. Her deceptively glossy pink interior opens up its secrets on subsequent viewing; fondant fancies on the table, a desolate drinks cupboard and some kind of disaster on TV hint at a particular feeling of ennui common to many a suburban British sitting room.

Vanessa Smith, Farewell to This Land's Cheerless Marches, 2022, oil & acrylic on canvas, 50x70cm

 

With strikes on the increase, a looming oil crisis, a corrupt government in power and Pistol streaming on Disney+, this jubilee feels like a re-imagining of 1977. In that long hot summer of discontent when the bunting fluttered, and the filth and the fury was unleashed onto screaming tabloid headlines because some ne’er-do-wells had sworn on TV, the backdrop was the truly shocking image of her majesty with a safety pin through her nose. Here’s hoping that Danny Boyle’s Pistol will inspire some contemporary youthful rebellion. Even though Off With Their Heads alluded to all this, the shock of lese majesty has dimmed with time.  Let’s face it, we all love Her Maj really. God Save the Queen, after all remember it is not her that ‘made you a moron’ it was just this bloody fascist regime! 

 

Alex Michon 

 

Off With Their Heads 

Don't Walk Walk Gallery, Deal, Kent 

2-12 June 2022

Allora & Calzadilla, Antille

Toby Upson is in Paris and playing to the stereotype - wandering the magical streets, wafting, like a flâneur caught in the high spring breeze, and surveying the art.

Having spent my morning walking the banks of the Seine, I entered the Musée d'Orsay for a spritz of capital ‘A’ museum Art. I leave with fond memories that make me feel ooh so Parisian as I peel layers off a buttery croissant. The addition of my Édouard Manet, Flowers dans un vase de cristal, postcard on the rickety wire table just adds to my romantic collage. 

 

Perhaps it is because of the beautiful sunny day, but as I walk past the Louvre my admiration for post-(and)Impressionist flower paintings grows - grows, and blooms. Much like the breeze emanating off the Seine’s waves, there is something in the thickly forms of Van Goth, Derain, Cézanne, or my fav’ Manet, that crashes out of their canvases emanating an attractive air of sprightly coolness. On an iconographic level, these bouquet paintings offer so much more than darling awe; each flower pertains to complex histories of migration, colonisation, commodification, as well as to spiritual and social connotations. These pretty images could be seen, or read, therefore as a documentary record of the beau-face of Modernity, and at the same time its asymmetric fallout: Coloniality, to follow Walter Mignolo. 

 

Continuing with my springful divergences, I arrive in the 4th Arrondissement and enter Galerie Chantal Crousel. I am welcomed by Graft (2021), thousands upon thousands of recycled polyvinyl petals pooled in windswept constellations on the gallery’s floor. Bonjour. Given my mornings wandering thoughts, and my associative personality, it is perhaps of no surprise that I felt an immediate pull to this seemingly tranquil exhibition. 

Allora & Calzadilla, Antille, 2022. Exhibition view, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photo, Martin Argyroglo.

Titled Antille, a reference to both the period before European colonisation of the Americas as well as the semi-mythical unknown land labelled on mediaeval maps as Antilia, the exhibition brings together three bodies of work by the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla (two of which I mention here). With a practice rooted in research, the pair clash materials and connotations to illuminate occluded geopolitical narratives. In Antille, the use of hand-painted plastic, video, and sound create an atmosphere that is at once cool, and then cutting; calling out the continued ecological effect of colonisation on the fauna of the Caribbean, and, to me, how this destruction is glossed over through petty associations. 

 

As with the speculative histories that can emerge once we look beneath the plasticy paintings of Manet et al. the sea of recycled petals that constitute Graft reference both the idle of summer vacations on ‘island paradises’ (think necks with garlands) as well as the direct ecological effect of this idle-vacating on the natural environment. Unlike the bold colours of those attractive Museum paintings - indeed of flashy holiday adverts - Allora & Calzadilla’s stilled-life uses muted tones of pink through brown to create its allure. This variation in hue shows seven stages in the biological breakdown of the flowers strewn on the floor. To me this staging of decay, enunciated in the kitchy camp language of mass consumption, can be read as a mirror to the false realities pictured and peddled by shiny Modernity; that is, an ideology that foregrounds its quest for a quick picturesque dream whilst turning a blind eye too, or just blatantly ignoring (denying) any long-term material ramifications of its trespasses.

Allora & Calzadilla, Antille, 2022. Exhibition view (detail of Graft, 2021), courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photo, Martin Argyroglo.

Amongst this sea of blossom, the natural liveness of the world is introduced into the exhibition’s space through video and sonic media. Penumbra (2020), is a minimal soundscape and a grainy series of video projections that trace the arc of the sun’s movements around the concealed gallery space. Echoing the vacated effect of colonial exploration/exploitation, David Lang’s audio sounds far from something fresh-air spritely. To link my metaphors, this quiet tweeting sounds more like an exhausted canary, than a perky parakeet. 

 

Riffing off of the associative is a way for Allora & Calzadilla to delight and illuminate through interaction - to paraphrase Michelle White in Antille's press release. The video footage of Penumbra furthers this intuitive thinking for aesthetic - dare I say, subtly-sublime - effect. The ghostly film appears not to be black and white but rather bleached of most of its saturation. Projected in soft focus, the twinkling shards of light and shadow brings to mind moments of awakening; those dewy-eyed seconds when one’s eyes adjust to the realities of the world after coming too from a deep sleep. To me, the footage recalls glimmers of the sun reflected off an expanse of water - memories of my romantic morning walk along the Seine come to my mind. In reality, the rippling shadows come from rays of sunshine dancing through Martinican foliage. If we are indeed waking from a Modern slumber, it seems the video asks us to see beyond that fantasy we have constructed for ourselves. 

Allora & Calzadilla, Antille, 2022. Exhibition view (detail of Penumbra, 2020), courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, photo, Andrew Wake.

This projection of the sun’s movements across the floors of the Absalon Valley of Martinique onto the walls of a Parisian gallery is a stunning metaphorical cut with Modernity. If those post-(and)Impressionist flower paintings, hanging on the walls in the city’s collections, can now be read in hindsight as a map for so much more writhing beneath the sheen of Modernity - that is Coloniality - this staging of life captured envelops us in the flows of colonial degradation. Moreover, it directly challenges me on my romantic associations; calling me out on what first comes to mind; forcing me to work to see beyond a notion of reality that is fixed and wholly known.

 

Graft and Penumbra, demonstrate Allora & Calzadilla's abilities to transform the known into something a little more hesitant; a way of thinking foregrounded by poet-philosopher Édouard Glissant. Indeed, if we think with Glissant and treat these two works as islands in an archipelago, their presentation here not only critically challenges modes of picturing life but provides a cool moment through which to begin to think of reality as a complex formed through numerable intersections; be these histories of migration, colonisation, commodification, the spiritual, the social and/or the geopolitical. After all, we must remember, that life is not idle, no romantic collage, nor postcard. Life is a living process of growing, growing, and blooming associations. 

Toby Upson

 

 

 

Allora & Calzadilla, Antille

Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris 

Until 28 May 2022