Caution Slippery Surface

David Barrett on Geraint Evans

 

For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.

Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, 1891

 

At first glance, these recent artworks by Geraint Evans look like conventional figurative paintings: simple allegorical depictions of a synthetic sublime. They are like displaced Pre-Raphaelite tableaux or declawed Romantic landscapes. But keep looking at the compositions and something disconcerting becomes apparent; the various elements that make up the scenarios don’t entirely fit together. In the painting Grizzly, for example, is the little girl sitting outdoors with a vast panorama spreading out behind her? Or is she posing in front of a reproduction backdrop? The unvarying flatness of the painting style makes it impossible to tell. And in the log-flume painting Krakatoa, is that a giant mountain in the distance or a fake mountain up close? Again, the homogeneous painting technique embraces such confusions.

 

This spatial difficulty is enhanced in works such as An Aviary, where picture-in-picture effects upset the entire sense of illusory 3D space. Since the paintings depicted in the artist’s studio are treated in the same manner as the supposedly real studio space, and the dabs of paint here and there across the studio floor could equally be read as descriptive texture or abstract facture on the surface of the canvas, the viewer cannot be entirely sure of the status of each pictorial element. This unsettling of the picture plane is nowhere more apparent than in An Ornamental Hermit, where the crazy paving has no perspectival regression and sits like a

geometric pattern just under the surface of the strange garden scene and effectively calls the entire composition into question.

 

But that is not all. Many of the characters inhabiting the scenes seem to be too stiffly posed; have they in fact been culled from holiday snapshots and collaged into the scenes, like pictorial tourists? This superimposed quality is partly due to the fact that the shadows lack any directionality, as if some digital processing that was intended to soften the cut-and-paste technique resulted in these unconvincing lighting effects. Ah, that familiar, deadening light: it is commonplace not only in the virtual world of video games and low-rent TV special effects but also real-world shopping centres, warehouses, superstores and trade fairs. In these new, all-encompassing habitats, arrays of lighting rigs produce insistent and unchanging conditions, no matter the time or season, no matter the Sun or atmosphere.

 

As well as revealing the poverty of our constructed environments, these paintings also debase the natural world, which is now experienced as merely a broader version of the copies we encounter in shopping centres and documentaries. The structures of managed tourism – guides, vantage points, viewing platforms – provide a cultural frame for nature, ensuring that even wild vistas come across as scenes that we have somehow already seen. Nature is filtered through our encultured vision – sight is, after all, a neural rather than optical sense – ensuring that we witness it more as a super-IMAX experience than anything genuinely overawing. Evans uses the same cool painting technique to fold the constructed and natural worlds together, making it clear that, in our experience, both are equally the products of human activity.

 

​