GENIEVE FIGGIS – ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE
2015-11-16Genieve Figgis’ first exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery stands as an eloquent testimony to the monarch’s prophesy; in All the Light We Cannot See, she rewrites the fashionable mid-eighteenth-century painting genre of “conversation pieces,” in a language of clotted blood and mystical delirium which reconstrues the proposed narrative as one of dissolution suffused in luxury. In her “cover version” of Thomas Gainsborough’s famous canvas, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (c.1750, National Gallery of Art, London), as well as more immediately topical works, viz., Royal Friends, Royal Gathering, Royal Group and House (all works acrylic on canvas, 2015), she transforms the genre’s representations of landed gentry, depicted in relatively informal poses, typically outdoors and upon estates where the atmosphere of ownership and permanence are illuminated by Praz’s “sun which seemed fated never to set.” Gainsborough’s original painting, a double portrait of Robert Andrews and his wife, Frances Mary Carter (“not quite the girl next door, but probably the nearest marriageable girl of his own class”) departs from the seeming informality of the conversation piece, and therein lies its uncanny effect, elevating it to a level of Masterpiece-Capital-M above such esteemed practitioners of the genre as Arthur Devis, Johann Zoffany, Philip Mercier, Francis Hayman, and the early William Hogarth. If the original portrait was designed to commemorate the subjects’ expanded properties through their recent marriage, Figgis relocates the couple to a landscape of endless dissolution, the beauty of her liquid pigments connects the luminous blues of a melting sky to vibrant ochre and black swaths of paint seemingly in constant motion. This is not a landscape that can be owned. The luminous pinks and whites of Andrews’s now skull-like visage benefit the painting and its viewer but not the sitter, whose painted identity has now dissipated as surely as his own earthly remains.
Opposite – Living Room, 2015
Exhibition runs through to December 19th, 2015
Almine Rech Gallery
11 Savile Row, Mayfair
London
W1S 3PG
