25th June 2015
by Giuseppe Marasco
In this solo show Justin Mortimer portrays iconic events from the news and internet, fusing these images into new configurations. Mortimer makes the case of the natural parallel to the overwhelming and unending choices that painters make, offers an answer to processing traditional Social Media in the 21st Century. The virtue of Mortimer’s work is it how liberates us of static positions.
Mortimer utilizes images from the news, but twists them into startling new contexts: a Femen Protester or Pussy Riot Girl is portrayed, yet before the image settles; it shifts into an Isis fighter, whose face mask has been painted bright neon.
The show’s aesthetic makes for a great response to the title of 56th Venice Biennale: ‘All the world’s futures, the other is one of us’, curated by Okwui Enwrzor. General opinion agrees that Sarah Lucas work was wide of the mark.
Possible futures are proposed through the genre of history painting. The contemporary history examined is that which we’ve seen on the news and have, most likely, pushed to the back our minds. In a series of epic canvases, Ebola alarmingly reaches the heights of the iconic Swiss Valleys, playing with the repressed fears that have been playing out in our collective unconscious for months since the Ebola outbreak. Here, Mortimer creates epic alternative reality paintings. This series of paintings are intensely beautiful, the slow of unfolding events is where the visceral punch hits you, puncturing the currents of the collective unconscious.
The Luminous and cinematic manner which Ebola finally makes it up in to the pristine altitudes of fortress Europe, underscores how different we would feel if it spread into the Swiss valleys and chalets.
The paintings look dream like, shifting through a variety of de-constructed styles and techniques. This conjures the effect of partially recalled impressions. The window-like spaces created in the paintings, let you see pleasurably the underlying structure and sensations. The Allusion to the West’s construction of its self-image makes an interesting tension with haunting potential of civilisations fall.
These paintings would send chills to the Davos set (the Swiss town is where political, business, academic and other leaders meet for the World Economic Forum), knowing all too well how fluid world borders are to money, technology and ideas. They’re sort of paintings that would inspire action if installed at the UN headquarters.
Mortimer, trained at the Slade School of Art, was thrown into the Spotlight in 1998 while still only 27 years old, for his floating head/decapitated portrait of HM the Queen set against an intensely luminous modern yellow. The Portrait was commissioned by the Royal Society of the Arts.
Mortimer work is a far cry from revelling in horror and nihilism for the sake of it, one of the ‘twin sins of British Art’, as eminent art Historian T.J.Clark would note. Mortimer is a master of suspense, who purposefully disguises and fuses images or context. Mortimer intents with his wrong footing to make us aware of how observe and to provoke insightful thought.
Showing till 27th June 2015
http://www.parafin.co.uk/artists–justin-mortimer.html