fake news / foreign bodies

Justin Mortimer: It Is Here, exh cat., Parafin, London, 2017

‘In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.’ Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Thesis 9

We are living through an extraordinary passage of history, witnesses to the unfolding of an ongoing series of seismic developments in which many orthodoxies of the old post-war world order are being challenged. Nothing is certain any more, it seems. A new phrase has become ubiquitous: ‘fake news’. It evokes something that appears to be real but is actually unreal, a fabrication. But how is art to address this shifting reality?

Aleppo, Calais, Nice, Berlin, Fukushima, Istanbul, Washington, Moscow. It is here. But what exactly? Political upheaval. An immigration crisis. Terror attacks. Conflict in the Middle East. Ebola. But also something intangible, perhaps. Something knowable but ineffable, like the gas cloud in Vector (2017); a pervasive, gathering disquiet and discontent, an uncertainty. Justin Mortimer’s paintings address this complex present moment directly.

However, we should not overstate the currency of Mortimer’s new work, or cast him as a primarily political artist. For he is above all else a painter of the body, of human beings. And his best works depict profound existential situations, the predicament of the individual in a hostile environment, self-consciousness, the intense otherness of the body, and the physical fragility of flesh and bone.

Mortimer’s paintings are not reportage, they are far too allusive and de-specified for that. Instead they represent a powerful and poetic visualisation of contemporary life, in all its grim and magical reality.

 ----

 Mortimer’s new paintings combine contemporary imagery sourced from the internet with archival material from old books and magazines. Reflecting this diverse source material, Mortimer’s resulting images are fragmented. This doesn’t just evoke the ways in which one’s perception of the contemporary world is now a kind of ever-evolving dynamic collage of imagery from an ongoing overload of print and digital information, but also suggests the ways in which the very fabric of society is increasingly fractured. The world is constantly shifting, and Mortimer’s paintings - with their strange elisions and jarring transitions - hint at the tectonic cracks and shifts appearing in the old world order.

It Is Here (2016), the large painting that gives the exhibition its title, epitomizes Mortimer’s ambiguous approach. A night scene featuring a naked figure, a tent and a shrouded, seated figure who gazes out at the viewer, it could be a scene from the Glastonbury Festival, perhaps the aftermath of a good time, but equally a depiction of the grim realities of The Jungle, the notorious refugee camp in Calais. Another large canvas, Zona (2016), transposes hazmat-clad figures, tumbling like marionettes, from the recent Ebola crisis in Africa, to a dark northern forest lit by flares and plumes of smoke culled from imagery of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. That smoke reappears in Witness (2016), alongside abstract elements, richly coloured striations derived from cracked plasma screens. So here we have representations of both medium and message, the news feed and its platform, the ubiquitous screens of phones, tablets and computers. Moreover, the eponymous ‘witness’ appears to be photographing the viewer of the painting. We are implicated.

On a smaller scale, a series of paintings depict a succession of hands, in splints, clasping each other, perhaps even struggling against each other. Overtures of the operating theatre. Dead flowers sit in a vase of brackish water, painted as an epiphanic revelation of everyday beauty.

Widow (2017) and The Lie (2017) recall images in the daily news of politicians sitting behind desks, signing papers at desks, of reporters behind news desks, and question the symbolism of the desk as a site of power. Here they are always vacant.

In Fugue (2016-17) an anonymous figure occupies a liminal space that is at once interior and landscape, and in which books and papers are piled up suggesting an excess of information.

 ----

 As a body of work, It Is Here powerfully articulates the present state. It is not a pleasant vision, though Mortimer finds extraordinary moments of beauty in passages of paint depicting smoke flares, a bank of CCTV monitors, the fluoro colours of hazmat suits, the texture and play of light on flesh or plastic.  

It is perhaps paradoxical to employ the venerable medium of oil paint to represent a twenty-first century world in thrall to the Debordian ‘Spectacle’; the constant feed of images reflecting not only power, control, trauma and conflict, but an unattainable material excess. But here Mortimer stakes a claim for the unique quality of painting and its ability to render reality. In the present moment, and against ‘the ubiquity and homogeneity of [digital photography]’, he has said, ‘painting is reinstating its power to cut through to the marrow of experience.’