Untitled

Untitled

Not long after graduating from Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1988, Séraphine Pick was dubbed a ‘pencilcase painter’. The term was used to describe a group of artists who were known for an expressive, whimsical style reminiscent of the doodles made while daydreaming. Pick sculpted paint into sensual textures, and from its primordial ooze emerged a host of characters and objects presented in the logic of dreamtime.

Two figures stand in a wooded glade, where the trees are barren, the grass brittle and yellowed. Their hands rest on an altar of obscure objects: a wolf, a high-heeled shoe, white flowers, olive branches, a stag’s head—all on a tree stump. Amidst the aqua landscape, the feminine figure stares vacantly at the viewer, while her naked counterpart averts his shadowy eyes. Poised in front of a gossamer swathe of fabric, she poses like a model in a camera flash. His lithe form references Romantic renderings of the sleeping Endymion, guarded by the moon goddess Selene. Where their feet should stand, spidery lines fuse them to the earth. It remains unclear if the earth has allowed these characters to spring forth from it, or if is yet to subsume them.

Together the figures evoke a host of disparate vignettes: Adam and Eve cast out from the Garden, clothed in their shame of sin; Titania awakening from her spell to look on Bottom’s true form; the Surrealist artist Leonor Fini and a naked lover in a role-reversal of the naked woman as muse. Perhaps even, they are two versions of the same person. The psychological dreamscape that Pick conjures from pop culture, magazines, outsider art, medieval painting and memories growing up in Kawakawa is equal parts absurd, nostalgic and strange—a pantheon of symbolic ambiguity.

This work was gifted to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery by printing press Muka Studio as part of a limited edition series commemorating its closure.

— Maya Love, 2022