| “Resort”, Justin Mortimer’s oeuvre of paintings for his first solo exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London, provided a painter’s view into a post-Bacon, post-moral landscape—employing an often sumptuous regard for the shadows; both painterly and psychological.
Mortimer is a painter with a classical concern for the figure. Having begun as a portrait painter, the evolution of his work places his painting in a category where the formal concerns of capturing likeness has given way to the existential focus of a 21st century painter living with the collective internet memory of Goya, Bacon, and Freud. |
|
Justin Mortimer: Resort To Nightfall
By Paul Black
“Resort”, Justin Mortimer’s oeuvre of paintings for his first solo exhibition at Haunch of Venison, London, provided a painter’s view into a post-Bacon, post-moral landscape—employing an often sumptuous regard for the shadows; both painterly and psychological.
Mortimer is a painter with a classical concern for the figure. Having begun as a portrait painter, the evolution of his work places his painting in a category where the formal concerns of capturing likeness has given way to the existential focus of a 21st century painter living with the collective internet memory of Goya, Bacon, and Freud.
The artist’s figures are variously placed in isolation within an environment. Conceptually, these echo the cages that Francis Bacon would often trap his human ‘meat-sacks’. But Mortimer’s forms are not turgid or animalistic, and the spaces in which his figures are placed hold a photo-realism gleaned from an original source material, but with surfaces pushed toward abstraction; blurring the definition of that environment, and thus any direct identity, or accurate moment in history. These environments are constructs by the artist, that source material—found images from the internet, text books, scans and personal photographs—are re-assembled as collage, as composites in photographic form. These are disparate images reformed to create dark, sullied, and subjective painterly narratives in which his figures reside or remain, trapped in limbo. These figures are reminiscent of a Baconian interest in human physicality and frailty, but like the narrative of a crime scene photograph, in which the viewer must attempt to discern an event where the evidence is shrouded in the gloom of a subjective reading—or in this instance hidden behind juxtaposition of grim party balloons—one must delve into the subconscious fugue state of Mortimer’s tableaux to pull to light what is submerged in darkness.
Justin Mortimer, Resort, 2012. 181 x 220 cm. Courtesy of Haunch of Venison.
To state the effect as a fugue is to reference a dreamlike quality that pervades the images not only through the content but through the artist’s use of paint. Mortimer builds the layers of his canvas, then strips them back, revealing areas and removing them, building the paint to a necrotic hue that infuses the landscape, the doors, pipes, medical apparatus, and the artist’s corralled bodies; all indicative of illness, weakness, and lending an oppressive air to figures that convey prisoners of war, torture victims, victims of chemical warfare, or even masochists in their dungeons.
But Mortimer’s figures are indeed victims, or in threat of victimisation. They may be victims of war, torture, politics, and varying indignities, but also through the entropy of their own bodies, or even by their own disgraceful hands. The works are a peep-hole into a world where the motifs of classical figurative painting take a page from Bacon’s old book of dentistry, picked from the detritus of his studio floor. The viewer becomes a wanderer in a psychological mise en scene; turning the corner of a dank corridor and gazing through glass at the moment of an immoral performance. The aforementioned sumptuous regard for the shadows and swathes of black paint are alluded to by an oblique and disturbed gaze; as the painter glances at an event while almost unable to process the sordid malaise; and in doing so shifts focus, or partly obscures ordeal and indignity—an attempt at obfuscation that heightens our concentration. This perspective he hands to the viewer with a projected sense of voyeuristic guilt.
Mortimer’s renderings are exemplifiers of our inexplicable fascination with degradation. The images present these scenes in a timeless nature; a collage of ahistorical fragments, each painting is an atemporal allusion of covetous horror in a wasteland of reformatted time and space.
