Catherine Clayton-Smith, Breeding Beauty
Oliver Watts
The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives. George Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, 1957.1
For George Bataille, Rococo sensuality was a form of transgressive play. He saw in the work of Jean-Honore Fragonard and Boucher not merely hedonistic frivolity, but a knowing form of eroticism that pointed to deeper questions of human desire and existential questions. In the erotic works of the Rococo, we catch normal social decorum off guard, breached by the “prodigious effervescence of life,” turning away from the profane of everyday life to the sacred.2
Breeding Beauty is Catherine Clayton-Smith’s most sensual exhibition to date. A planned swing painting, directly referencing Fragonard, was left unfinished. In its stead, though, every painting in the show seems to spin and move around an axis, as if in flight. It is as if all the paintings are structured on waves of desire.
The paintings are contemporary reworkings of some of the playful eroticism of the Rococo, brought up to date. Lovers are no longer hiding in trees but in plain sight. The garden setting is now the pot-planted interior of Clayton-Smith’s own apartments. For Bataille, the garden was a site of excess in Rococo painting, a carnivalesque space where normal rules don’t apply. Clayton-Smith finds new spaces to find “sacred” disorder. Eavesdrop is a perfect space of play, the oval of the resort pool or jacuzzi, like a liquid stage set ready for its actors.
Many of the paintings are structured on veiled human bodies and plants. Sow, perhaps connected most directly to the title of the exhibition. Whether it is a self-portrait or not is unclear, but the female gaze, the artist’s own take, on the Rococo nude is clear. The artist and the model are one, and this proximity is a great surprise against the moral objective, distant gaze of the male viewer/artist of the past.
The voluptuous bodies, the Breeding Beauty, however, are still also the male fantasy, part of the male gaze. The body is not really the mother’s body, but merely the (male) desire, or the fetish for the breeding body. This narrative is still squarely within the artist/model’s control. There is a motif of the Night Queen plant, which is found in various paintings, and that refers to Clayton-Smith, like a visual motif as an autograph. It is a beautiful, scented flower that only flowers once. Clayton-Smith sees that caring for this special, fragile plant is akin to cultivating a gentle awareness.
The male nude is also treated in a particularly fresh and interesting way. The works move between the archetypal and the specific. In the paintings, Adam and Zeus, real people
1 Georges. Eroticism. (1957) Translated by Mary Dalwood. London: Penguin Books, 2001
2 Ibid.
may be referenced, but on the other hand, they are mythical figures, literally the A-Z of masculinity.
There is something very intimate and true in Adam that is reminiscent of the softness of a Rodin watercolour, both hard and soft. The realness is seen in the detail of the condom covered phallic shape, part skin, part silicon.
Zeus at the top of the picture plane seems the main actor in the scene, and there is both passion and pleasure in this rolling composition. It is clear here, though, that in a neoRococo erotic joke, Zeus is not sitting on a throne, as a humanist god, but merely as a pleasure seeker. For Bataille and others, this was the sort of challenge against solemn grandeur that art should make, and that erotic critique could do well.
Indeed, all Clayton-Smith’s work seems to be made up of the intimate fragment rather than some solid sculptural heroic element. The centre does not hold in Clayton-Smith’s work. Using her camera phone as a sketching device and aide memoire, these paintings reference Clayton-Smith’s own personal (phone) archive. Inhaling Air (Part II) features the window at Olsen Gallery, from a photo taken many years previously. Lovers, landscapes, views, plants, and other objects are recalled and placed carefully together.
It is tempting to see Clayton-Smith’s work as ‘provisional painting’ as described in Raphael Rubinstein’s now famous essay 3 Although the reading of all these works is open, they are not “uncertain, incomplete, casual, self-cancelling or unfinished” as provisional painting. Instead, they are intentional, deliberate, and slow. Embers, for example, has been many years in the making, with a painful process of overpainting. It is important to see ClaytonSmith’s softness and transparency as deliberate and telling. They speak to the softness and fragility of their subjects. The work retains a lightness and ease, a mask of innocence perhaps, that is the perfect vehicle for these explorations of sensual wonder.
Throbbing Heart is a good combination of the private and the literary, the mythic and the intimately personal. In the centre of a cave is a burning tree. An oval-toothed trap seems to be guarded by a snake (the lover?). Although a darker work about lost love and the dangers of desirous abandonment, there is still a hopeful light at the end of the tunnel, an escape.
Clayton-Smith’s work is full of visual codes; hidden references and the artist herself is veiled and obscured. Like a masked ball, the works reveal and hide flirtatiously, like a controlled seduction. In these works, sensuality and beauty are used as an artistic sabre. The works speak not just of fun but of deep eroticism, which puts everything on the line, body and soul.
3 Raphael Rubinstein, “Provisional Painting,” Art in America (May 1, 2009), https://www.artnews.com/art-inamerica/features/provisional-painting-raphael-rubinstein-62792/.