Anj Smith - Flowering of Phantoms

A solo show by the young British painter Anj Smith, The Flowering of Phantoms at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in 2012 started my desire to look deep into modern morbidity. Aboundant in meticulously rendered landscapes, animals, and human figures, these miniature paintings unequivocally refer to the once-prevalant Vanitas by the Flemish old masters. Born in 1978, Smith has achieved international fame fresh out of graduate school, all thanks to her impeccable mastery of miniature impasto that instills in her paintings a fine sculptural nature. As a montage of textures, the darkly lit yet reflective surfaces of Smith’s paintings “draw you close, yet they never quite satisfy the desire for proximity they incite[1].” As art critic Barry Schwabsky speaks of the style as the heart of modernism and contemporary pictorial mannerism[2], Anj Smith’s style is a mixture developed from the awkward era she lives in. Growing up stuck in the collision of multiple religious sects and the rising commercialism in fashion, Smith sees the fetish after luxuries as a parallel to dark religious cults. Founding her brushstrokes on traditional Indian miniatures, her composition on the visual hierarchy of11th century Persian paintings, and her sympathy on the prevalent fundamentalism in 17th century Dutch vanitas paintings, Smith borrows various elements from the oriental and the past, and stuffs in Western references to fashion and commodity.

More violent and atrocious, Anj Smith’s personal trace is the omnipresent blood in her paintings. Amid the withered floras often sits an injured girl, barely covered by torn clothes. Her sickly exposed female skin is encroached by small animals and herbs. Out of the prevailing death in the surroundings, only the parasites attached to the morbid human body are flourishing. Here, the nudity is no longer an attraction; on contrary, the pornographic details become an insidious extension of the alluring conception of sex found in Reeves’s works. Smith also uses languages; yet her words are unspoken, buried under the ripped fabrics that bear brand-name patterns. “There always seem to be half-lives of meaning left in visual languages irretrievably lost,” explained Smith, “ the signification of [past rhetoric] is in the

process of decay[3].”

[1] Barry Schwabsky, “Everyday Grotesque,” in Anj Smith: Paintings, ed. Tim Nye et al. (New York: Foundation 2021, 2007), 27.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Anj Smith, “Nicolaus Schafhausen in conversation with Anj Smith,” in Anj Smith: Paintings, ed. Tim Nye et al. (New York: Foundation 2021, 2007), 27.

#photo #ep #freedownload