- Venue
- Rockwell
- Location
In The Exaltation of the Tamarin Isabel Young's paintings play on our expectations of still life, mixing traditional subjects with more unexpected guests that lurk in amongst her platters of fruit or fish: miniature monkeys sit against a background of oversized vegetables; a tiny cat watches over a platter of huge dead fish; a pelican and a cockerel stand regally beside a lit candelabrum.
Her animals are far from inanimate or stuffed. Derived from observational studies within zoos, they are alert, sometimes even staring out to capture the viewer's gaze. In one painting (which gives the show its title), a man in a red checked blanket humbly offers up a gift of fish to a Tamarin monkey that sits high above him in a tree looking down, one hand on the branch in front as though leaning on the arm of a throne – the golden coloured background illuminating his eminent status. In many of the works, the animals seem in charge, wandering around the shadowy, eerie world that Young has created for them. The inclusion of living animals emphasising, as Alison Hand has written, the deadness of the still life objects and their surroundings.1 However, in other works, the reverse is true: the overbearing, large-scale nature of the fruit or vegetables almost seems to imbue the food with life. In the murky disquiet of this world, vegetables can become menacing: pale, moonlit leeks line the shadowy background of one painting, standing watch like sentinels over another small monkey, this time captured underneath a brilliant-green cage. The works are uncanny and unsettling, but there is no denying they are also occasionally wry – for example, the way a large bunch of bananas takes up the foreground of another work while two iguanas sit unimpressed, above on a branch.
If you compare these new works with Young's previous paintings, (for example, her painting Remains that was selected for the John Moores 23 exhibition in 2004), you realise that her interest in the interplay between civilisation and the natural world remains a preoccupation. The combination of the ordered, traditional still life, with the insidious, perhaps genetically over-sized vegetables and the superior and indifferent animals, hints at a world where we are no longer the key protagonists. Young has written of "the terrifying prospect that nature is stronger than we are … [and] the grim assurance of nature's supreme indifference to mankind"2 and certainly, in The Exaltation of theTamarin, this indifference continues, leaving us uncertain of our fate in the strange world that Young presents to us.
1. Alison Hand, The Exaltation of the Tamarin, gallery text, Rockwell, London, 2007.
2. John Moores 23, exhibition catalogue, the Walker (National Museums Liverpool), Liverpool, 2004.
http://www.isabelyoung.com/about.htm
Rachel Fleming-Mulford lives and works in London.
