'Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.'
Medusa's Lair is a triumphant trompe l’oeil, a subterranean panorama of polymorphous perversity. It captures a liminal state between a painting and a film, suggested by the 16:9 black bar framing (letterboxing).
When you’re watching a film and the art direction is really beautiful, it’s almost as though you could stop that at any point and that could be a work of art in and of itself. Similarly, all of the most iconic photographs exert a sense of cinematic grandeur: there appears to be some other purpose beyond the static image in some larger, overarching narrative.
The people in the painting are in a stone sofa that’s perfectly moulded around the current shape of their bodies, halting the suggested movement of film.
The piece plays into New Media’s dissolution of the static, coherent image, encapsulated by the modern iPhone boomerang format and 80s vogueing (simultaneously a dance and a pose) while also paying homage to the sensuous nudes of Caravaggio and classical antiquity.
In the top right hand of the painting, one man falls asleep into his mane as if it were a neck pillow to rest his head in at an airport departure lounge. His claw knuckle-busters effetely pierce a chocolate coated strawberry, taken from the ritualistic, lingam-yoni inflected chocolate fountain stalagmite scene on the right.
Medusa's Lair (2019)
Oil on canvas, 130 x 100cm
Below, the artist herself is depicted donning a vaudevillian corset with a ruff which accidentally doubles as a napkin, pre-emptively mopping up the falling martini glass. Medusa is in ritual communion with the snake; a closer look reveals a pattern in the snake doubling as an eye, while the tongue of the creature and woman meet seductively. In the top left hand corner, a satyr’s horned crown vies for similitude with the stalactite chard-chandelier.