ART CITIES:London-Justin Mortimer
Justin Mortimer’s paintings consistently invite us to question the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and between figuration and abstraction. While the imagery is almost exclusively pitiless, the texturing of the paint, the play between light and shade and the passages that lead from photo-realist definition to near-abstract formlessness.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Parafin Gallery Archive
Justin Mortimer’s new series of works, entitled “Breed”, and are on show at Parafin in London build upon the “Hoax” series exhibited at the Armory Show, New York, in 2018. In the “Hoax” series Mortimer subverted and reimagined the genres of still life and flower painting, creating fragmented depictions of dead and dying flowers juxtaposed with fluidly abstract backgrounds. series was both a meditation on mortality but also addressed the dialectic relationship between abstraction and realism in painting. In his new works Mortimer continues to investigate the still life theme but with two crucial new developments. These new paintings are vastly enlarged and for the first time combine spray painting with Mortimer’s characteristic brushwork. By scaling up his compositions to a monumental size Mortimer produces an extraordinary visual dissonance. We are confronted with natural objects, flowers, leaves and vases, depicted in paint at many times their actual size. Secondly by using fine spray paint in his works Mortimer produces a cognitive rupture between areas of the image that appear to be out of focus and the foreground motifs which then assume vivid clarity. The relationship between figure and ground is problematised. On close inspection the illusion of pictorial reality breaks down as the marks and brushstrokes and clouds of fine paint that constitute the image are revealed. Mortimer has long been fascinated by the way visual information is mediated by technology. His new works are flower paintings for the 21st Century, complete with ruptures and glitches to remind us that the image is derived from a screen and always several steps removed from reality. Mortimer’s flower paintings offer a paradoxical tension between realist painting, illusion and our understanding of the physical object before us; pigment on canvas. Moreover, by calling his new paintings “Breed”, Mortimer points not only to the types of plants depicted, often bred to enhance particular characteristics, but a kind of proliferation, an endless replication, not only of natural forms but of images too.
Info: Parafin Gallery, 18 Woodstock Street, London, Duration: 19/7-21/9/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.parafin.co.uk
