Land of Mortimer

Overview

We are pleased to present ‘Land of Mortimer’, our second solo exhibition for the artist James Mortimer, with a series of new paintings taking a fantastical journey into an idealised return to nature.

The works in ‘Land of Mortimer’ present a reimagined Garden of Eden where man and beast exist on equal footing. There is a seductive air of uncomplicated freedom, with people living in communion with nature. But in exploring this idyll, James also uncovers the often-ignored implications that such an existence involves. Freed from social constraint, people behave unthinkingly with a blissful lack of self-awareness, and once governed by their basest instincts soon find themselves given over to shameless naked abandon: to foolish acts of wanton violence, sexual impropriety, and long afternoons of listless indolence.

What results is a world whose fauna is both animal and human, all acting at much the same level of consciousness. Frolicking deer range over open plains and hungry baboons eat nesting egrets, while semi-clad woodsmen hack at trees with axes or drown each other in the lakes. Anything man-made – architecture, engineering – is naive in its construction, indicative of a vague concept rather than something meticulously crafted. In contrast, trees and bushes are minutely detailed and peppered with visual innuendo, a kind of Freudian formalism that underpins every aspect of Mortimer’s land.

For all their rude exuberance, the works in ‘Land of Mortimer’ have deep currents running beneath them. By tapping into the carnal aspect of human nature, they echo the moral ambiguities sometimes found in folkloric myth and ritual. It is a timelessness also articulated through James’s buttery use of paint that lends his scenes an anachronistic haze. In exploring the desire for a return to nature and the bucolic idealism that this entails, James touches on a very human truth that has been carried down from the myth of the Garden of Eden onwards: that any desire for innocence is, inevitably, already tainted by the very act of desiring.

 

 

Artworks

James Mortimer | Shark Garden
James Mortimer
Shark Garden
James Mortimer | Camel Woman
James Mortimer
Camel Woman
James Mortimer | Sheep Man
James Mortimer
Sheep Man
James Mortimer | Island Man
James Mortimer
Island Man
James Mortimer | Lake Islands
James Mortimer
Lake Islands
James Mortimer | Baboon
James Mortimer
Baboon
James Mortimer | Fight Room
James Mortimer
Fight Room
James Mortimer | Hippo Skull Interior
James Mortimer
Hippo Skull Interior