Ha-ha Picturesque
Essay on the paintings of John Seal for KÖNIG Magazine Issue 7 | Fall 2020
From the essay:
A triangulation of light sources hover before a manicured garden in The Light That I Saw By Was the Light That I Was. A peach-toned candle stands burning and dripping in the foreground, flanked by two identical decorative table lamps. They claim space above, or in front of, a variety of flourishing trees and shrubbery. This garden cannot be seen without seeing the candle and the lamps before it. Proffering all the earthly delights of the English Picturesque, it becomes an airless background overlaid with household objects. In The Ripples Return as Echoes of Another Shore, the motif of the table lamp resurfaces. Its irradiation gradually fades towards the top of its floral background, identifying it as the image’s sole light source. In both of these works, Lorrain’s soft sunlight has transmogrified into symmetrical arrays of post-industrial illumination. The landscape’s dramatic splendor has flattened into horizonless scenery. The resplendent Arcadian dream has been sublimated into elegantly consumerist picture puzzles.
Like the decorative lamps, a range of motifs recur across multiple canvases, gesturing to the serial nature of their commercial dissemination and consumption. Living room chairs block garden pathways or sink to the bottom of a pond. Apples, bananas, grapes, and pears can be found in a plastic-wrapped basket, farcically suspended in front of tree branches, or in outsize arrangements among vibrant flowerbeds. Elements of the still life, the lithographic copy of the still life, the last-minute gift, and the household produce bowl become interchangeable signifiers. They’re equally devoid of their social value, steeped in purposelessness. Now it’s their destiny to be subsumed under the generic term “fruit,” which may never recover its primeval allure.
The artist situates these and other household objects—furniture, dishes, appliances—in positions that trigger impressions of incongruity. Spatially and logically, they’re always off-kilter. Temporally, they gesture in every direction at once. Time moves neither forward nor backward because its linearity, like the objects themselves, has become defunct. Everything and nothing is anachronistic in a paradise where aimless leisure perpetuates a recursive loop. What these objects do possess is a refusal to coalesce—with their environments and with themselves. The gratification of sublimity is indefinitely delayed.
Images, from top to bottom (all works by John Seal):
The Light That I Saw By Was the Light That I Was, 2018
The Ripples Return as Echoes of Another Shore, 2018
In the Moment Between One Tick and Another of the clock Lies an Eternity Boundlessly Fecund, 2019
