Zatorski + Zatorski Juliette Losq Olivia Kemp 13 March to 5 April 2025
Still Life is also known as Nature Morte – in French, literally Dead Nature. Yet from its earliest beginnings, Nature Morte was anything but. Artistic depictions of inanimate objects were full of symbolism, driven by the idea that earthly things could speak to us about matters sublime. ‘Nature Immortelle’ looks at these immortal aspirations through the work of Zatorski + Zatorski, Juliette Losq, and Olivia Kemp.
Zatorski + Zatorski’s photographic works reference the painterly tradition of Baroque Vanitas where Still Life arrangements of earthly riches represented the fleetingness of mortality, prompting the viewer to reflect on their spiritual health. In Zatorski + Zatorski’s works, this is expanded as a visual journey into the unconscious. The artistic duo live and work aboard 19th century 100ft Dutch sailing ship De Walvisch (The Whale), and like the archetypal ark afloat on the sea of consciousness, it provides the setting for purely photographic imagery that nevertheless seems unreal. Entities from the deep emerge from their liquid realm to form surreal, dreamlike juxtapositions: an octopus with a naked figure lying on a bed and jellyfish on cotton, wet and dry creating fetishistic textural contrast; a lacerated shark whose innards are observed by a reflected figure who could be looking on from the Dutch Golden Age. Vanitas here becomes infused with modern surrealism, its spiritual aims driven deep into the symbolic imagination of the viewer. The concerns of mortality and the soul remain, articulated in a historical yet distinctly contemporary visual language.
Juliette Losq’s paintings take the concept of Still Life and extend it into landscape painting. Her scenes of dilapidated industrial hinterlands are only partially real: though based on physical places, they are just as much visual constructions to enchant the viewer in the tradition of optical devices such as the paper peepshow. Scenes of rampant nature are layered with architectural constructions, all of which appear as if underwater. The large monochrome ‘Capriccio II’ shows this working process depicted as a giant trompe l’oeil. Juliette’s sources are laid out as if on a workspace, fragmented and disjointed, tendrils from one somehow already sprawling beyond their limits to intertwine with the other papers. The mammoth painting ‘Diluvian’ presents the result of this process: a cryptic scene of an overgrown waterway where each conceptual space cascades through the next. It delves ever downwards into a grotto-like world of uncontrolled nature where the ordered constructs of society become subsumed and overwhelmed. This treatment of landscape as Still Life disrupts the comfortable conceit of nature as scenery, instead tapping into something more eternal and primeval.
Olivia Kemp’s monumental ink drawings are meditations on a theme, exquisitely detailed and developed over months without pre-planning or sketching. The large work here considers the experience of grief and loss: of how objects left behind connect us to special places and cherished memories, and how the experience of loss, far from being isolating, is something shared, a group that we join and never leave. Inanimate objects, the typical subjects for Still Life, become pregnant with deeply personal meaning. Olivia articulates this by giving each its own distinct pattern, a sense of uniqueness suggesting they represent much more than just their physical state. The enormity of the drawing and the abundance of detail make it impossible to absorb all at once: scattered items, painted portraits, remembered landscapes and old furniture act like a visual map guiding the eye through a web of memories, emotions and remembrances. Figures float within this web, anchored to the objects that surround them and the memories they represent. They stare out from the overload of intense emotional markers that hold them in place and give them form.
‘Nature Immortelle’ opens on Thursday 13 March, 6:30 – 8:30pm. To register for the PDF Preview Catalogue, please do so via the ‘Request PDF Catalogue’ link above.
