Secret Life

A common ground to be found in a greenhouse opened to public

When you come in, you are sweetly welcomed by the perfect environment: which one would be more suitable for an exhibition about the relationship between human insight and plants than an actually close one by appearence to a greenhouse? As a matter of fact, this comparison may sussist just owing to the presence of an exclusive light, due to glass ceilings and immaculate white walls. The issue is probably that human and plants absolutely need light to survive.

An example of Sadie Coles' art gallery glass ceilings

The choice of artworks permits the viewer to enjoy the argument: Horovitz and Peyton show a rich range, which streches from paintings, prints and drawings to installations and photographs, so that they finally give birth to a striking collaboration in which their own technics melt into each other.

Horovitz' and Peyton's monotype

You see at first Horovitz' canvases, which depict houseplants settled in the frame just as blanched photographic negatives with a solid colourful background (as you meet four other ones forwards), and then Peyton's various and different from one another drawings and paintings. It is possible to define Peyton's trait as extremely slight and precise in drawings, instead her brush stroke is much more defined; on the whole her style can be stated as ingrained by a massive use of colours. Elisabeth Peyton successfully paints also two portraits of a young and truly severe Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, who had attributed significant meanings, such as love, lust, longing, to the flora.

Carrying on, the observer comes through two Horovitz' installations: two “liberated” bonsais, which had been transplanted, one into a reedition of a Victorian circular wooden bathtub and the other one into a cilindrical vessel made of recycled lumber; indeed erudite quotations do not miss to this current show, as we may notice from two Freud's portraits, but above all from the heading itself, which is “Secret Life”, related to “The Secret Life of Plants” (1979) by Christopher Bird and the anonymous “My Secret Life” (c. 1888). Then, there is a sequence of photographs and oil paintings on the same wall to follow, all representing plants in vases, which makes the paintress' skills seem scancy, in spite of the great abilities, which are actually recognisable, in the previous artworks exhibited. You would have expected to find the high level met before, while the delusion suddenly affects you until the surprising ending of the exhibition: the same monotype, reproduced twice, is the witness of a winning team, whose members are a woman and a man. A Horovitz' usual silhouette appears to surrender its background to a Peyton's naive one, and the result lifts Peyton's talent out of an undesirable situation.

A view of Sadie Coles' art gallery

The way an argument can be so contemporary still in 2012, despite of time's flow, is truly appealing, similarly artists of the present can fit so well to a certain discourse, of course wheter it is the one on human condition, in which houseplants might be the interface between “the world of our sensations and the world outside, as Sigmund Freud guessed. A Latin motto recites: “Fugit tempus et venit eternitas”, namely “Time runs away and eternity comes.”

Sadie Coles' art gallery

07 June – 25 August 2012

4 Burlington Place
London W1S 2HSO

Open Tue-Frid 11-6 
Sat 12-6

An exhibition by Jonathan Horovitz and Elisabeth Peyton