Museum (2022)
Oil on canvas (120 x 90cm)
Clean-cut classicism, recalling the stable, foursquare directionals of the male chest is vandalised by Dionysian curves and deluge of colour and line.
Its balanced expanse of stoic, empty space is offset by vulgar, asymmetric urgency.
The connoisseurship of the classic hourglass is fed through the Boolean logic of 3D modelling, as space is subtracted between the top figure’s figure’s shapely extremities.
These graffiti lovers share the voluptuous embrace of Baroque bodies, yet rebuff Baroque’s invitation to multiple viewing angles.
Painting’s two dimensional fiction collides with subject matter’s three dimensional reality as the hand of both artist and muse meet around the mirror/magnifying glass.
The thigh-high paint lick pushes this further, breaking the viewer’s fourth wall of artistic immersion.
The muse is pushed to a point of ultimate sexual mystique: shadowy confinement undoes the elevated visibility of her boudoir lectern. The contours of her jaw and languidly outstretched neck lit solely by her spiked halo and the mirror’s glimmering filigree, tumbling gold coins at her beauty altar.
True ‘looking’ is futile - the opaqueness of the magnifying glass thwarts the artist’s forensic scrutiny, instead their hubris bumps into the French doors of reality, their complicity and construction in the myth of woman as narcissus, the prison of their own making.
The fingerprints of both artist and muse are on the black mirror of contemporary narcissism.
She is wind-up doll, Nabokovian nymphet. The artist’s hand holds the reigns of her golden curls as she freezes in yielding Arabesque, a perversion of the ballerino’s gently outstretched arm.
Yet she exhibits a fortified stoniness, while the artist’s calloused skin registers the effort of romantic ardor.
This floating hand patiently waits at her fountain parapet, recalling the obliging choreography of courtly love. A bending at the knee to girlish femininity’s ivory tower, balcony of Juliet.
The promiscuous cat-and-mouse of a pas de deux.
Les Bains is a Sapphic spoonerism translating to ‘the baths’ in French.
And so becomes the peephole prologue into a fictional bathhouse, confirmed by the gold lettering on the door, recalling the elegant titling on the spines of old books.
Words by Beatrix Haxby