Alternative Eden | James Mortimer at SOLO CONTEMPORARY
James Mortimer (b.1989) Horse Cliff. Oil on linen, 183 x 152.5 cmIf Eve hadn’t gone for that apple, would the Garden of Eden have remained, for evermore, an unspoilt, innocent paradise? James Mortimer’s surrealist, symbolic, uncanny paintings suggest not, describing an alternative Eden, where: ‘Freed from social constraint, people behave unthinkingly with a blissful lack of self-awareness, and once governed by their basest instincts soon find themselves given over to shameless naked abandon: to foolish acts of wanton violence, sexual impropriety and long afternoons of listless indolence’.
Mortimer is represented by James Freeman Gallery, based in the Angel, Islington, who are bringing his latest body of work to the SOLO CONTEMPORARY section of British Art Fair. Each painting tells a tale from the Bath-based artist’s parallel dystopia: one man, standing among human and equine bones, gently strokes the mane of a handsome horse while preparing to cut its throat with a dagger; another is savaged by a dog on the balcony of a sumptuous villa, while his friend looks on, impassively; a third takes a dip in the sea, oblivious to a naked woman being thrown from a rowing boat behind him.
There’s dark humour behind the work, which is, I reckon, indebted to Hieronymus Bosch, Breughel the Elder and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The style of painting, however, is very much Mortimer’s own. The anatomical detail of the human and animal figures brings a three-dimensionality to his scenes: the cast of these visual narratives inhabit rich, fantastical landscapes, recalling the anachronistic backgrounds of the Renaissance Masters. He uses oils, but the restrained chalky palette is reminiscent of egg tempera frescoes. The devil’s in the detail: round every corner there’s something going disturbingly awry. Heaven, in James Mortimer’s unsettling world, has become alarmingly akin to Hell.