GIUSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO
(1526-93) may not exactly be a household name, but he is the witty
and bizarre Italian painter best known for painting portrait heads
from a mix of fruit and veg., flowers, and all manner of things.
Nothing is ever quite as it seems, and there is a degree of
mischief as well as brilliance in all his allegorical work
(although he undertook more conventional commissions that have
fallen into oblivion).
Surprisingly, he became
the imperial court painter to the Habsburgs, serving Ferdinand I in
Vienna and his son Rudolf II in Prague. Their cousin Philip II in
Spain might have felt relieved that he had called Titian to work
for him in Spain had he seen the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II
depicted as the Roman God of Spring Vertumnus (c
1590).
From a distance, the
portrait is at once recognisable, albeit allegorical. Close up, it
comes as a shock to find that it has been contrived with a gourd
for the emperor's chest and courgettes supporting his Adam's apple.
Pea pods serve as eyebrows and two ripe cherries form his lips
falling over a couple of lychees that make a goatee and so on.
Seemingly random objects
take on a life of their own as Arcimboldo avoids caricature; animal
tails that might be used as dusters wittily serve a dusty old
librarian as a beard. Some scholars worried that they were being
mocked, but the artist was passing judgement on the attitudes of
others. Like Hamlet, he knew a hawk from a handsaw. It would be for
others to judge whether he was mad or not.
David LaChapelle (b.
1963) is definitely not mad, but his most recent series of eight
large C-print photographs is equally challenging and witty, even
though it fills the first and second floor of this gallery so
exuberantly with wall after wall of saturated colour. It is his
fourth international show in the thriving West End of London.
From a distance, we are
presented with sharply lit (often night shots) oil refineries,
presented as if they are latter-day temples in a culture of energy
production and ecological waste. But all is not quite as it
seems.
"Anaheim", "Emerald
City", "Greenfields", "Luna Park", "Castle Rock" - their very names
are deceptive. As in Britain, so in the United States, incongruous
and often innocent-seeming names conceal industrial plants and
brown field housing developments much as Victorian terraced housing
had happier names "Sunnyview" and "El Dorado".
The city of Anaheim, as
part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, is mightily proud of its
first grid-connected photovoltaic power-generation system. At the
Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Emerald City "connects the
evergreen ethic of the Pacific Northwest with the sense of
possibility and wonder associated with travel", where green LED
fixtures will illuminate towers of vine to convey the concept of
the "green city" by night. Green crystalline photovoltaic panels on
the south side of the tower will provide renewable energy.
LaChapelle comments
provocatively on all this self-justifying rhetoric in our
petroleum-dependent age, forcing us to ask questions about what
constitutes real energy and where the source of power is by making
us look closer into his deeply crafted photographs that turn out
not to be what they first suggest.
Each of these large
pictures, whether of refinery towers belching smoke into the night,
giant cooling towers, or poisonous reflections cast into the
industrial waste waters of a nuclear power plant, is a carefully
realised studio production.
This nightmare world of
corporate greed and energy debates is contrived from the equally
nightmarish world of our own "throwaway" society: drinking straws,
Starbucks' Styrofoam cups, recycled beer cans, hair curlers,
corrugated paper, and ordinary Duracell batteries are among the
hundreds of everyday objects of our wasteful society used in
building each photographic installation.
In Greenfields
(182 × 189cm), the complex machinery in the foreground turns out to
comprise plastic measuring jugs, stuck together mouth to mouth and
linked to VTech mobile phones. Luna Park contains upturned
jelly moulds and egg boxes as well as tubs of Similac infant
formula. Riverside is built on the caffeine waste of
Rockstar energy drinks and the like.
Alongside these
large-scale indictments of our energy-crazed world, LaChapelle sets
three almost idyllic scenes of disused petrol stations photographed
by night with the expressive power of Edward Hopper's 1942
evocative painting of a cheap diner at night. But, whereas in
Nighthawks, the artist had peopled the scene of despair,
the photographs suggest abandonment and emptiness. On closer
inspection, we come to see that the photographer has pulled off yet
another brilliant coup de folie.
On the showing of these
works. I do not imagine for a moment that he has invested his own
millions in utility stocks, whether of renewable energies or not,
or that he would be welcome at any AGM, but his critical voice and
his quirky photography have a deceptively powerful vision.
"David La
Chapelle: Land Scape" is at Robilant +Voena, 38 Dover Street,
London W1, until 18 June. Phone 020 7409 1540
www.robilantvoena.com