Russell Webb is a Brighton-based artist who creates trompe-l’oeil sculptures of everyday objects. Russell’s work sits firmly in the purest tradition of Still Life, where often overlooked items were presented as a focus of attention, even of meditation. This was particularly so in Spanish 17th century bodegones, where fruits, vegetables, and books were presented with an austerity that lent an almost mystical aura to the humdrum. Russell’s painted wood sculptures do much the same but with contemporary sensibility and humour. While his bunch of asparagus or plump pear could have been plucked straight from the 17th century, there is both empathy and romanticism in his work: his ‘Little Victories’, mandarin peels removed in one piece and kept as representing a small achievement for the day, extend the simplicity of their subject into daily life’s intimate experiences. Russell’s twigs are carved from curtain poles found discarded in the street, reworked under the banner of ‘Stick Surgery’ to give them a second life as their natural selves. Much like flowers, his rotten fruits may hint at symbolic transience, but they also have a slapstick playfulness to them, realistic conceits deceiving the unwitting. In Russell’s work the human being is both genius and fool, a talent that invests its labour in artistic folly, an ‘unnecessary’ act that is nonetheless one of humanity’s most defining activities.
