‘In May, I Sing Night and Day’ presents a new body of work by British artist Georg Wilson (b. 1998), created while on residency at Palazzo Monti during the month of May this year. In materials ranging from oil on wood, linen, and coloured pencils on ivory paper, the exhibition showcases ongoing themes in Wilson’s practice, with particular inspiration drawn from the Italian landscape.
Directly inspired by vernacular folktales and rural customs, the paintings together form a complete world, bound by narrative as well as medium. Each scene is populated by Wilson’s ‘creatures’, who roam the landscape enacting strange rituals and stories. These creatures reflect their natural surroundings and the time of year in which they were painted, taking inspiration from the specific wildlife of May in Britain and northern Italy. The beings defy easy classification; they are a blend of humanity and animality, familiar and unfamiliar. They exist in a parallel world, a wilder alternative reality where humans are absent. Together, the works form a grander narrative, an alternative history, an allegorical tale. These collected scenes exist in a realm of their own chronology, with no clear beginning or end, they call to mind the cyclical changing of the seasons.
The absence of architecture, clothing or other human elements make it impossible to place Wilson’s creatures in a specific period. Their skin reflects the colours of the landscape they inhabit, changing throughout the cycle from day to night. Hairy limbs sprout claws and hoofs, which conjures them into the animal realm, and their body hair and bulging proportions add another layer of ambiguity, making them more creature-like than any identifiable gender.
Wilson’s unusual choice of material for smaller works harkens back to a historic genre of art: thick poplar and linden wood boards, traditionally used for Orthodox iconography. The many chalky layers of gesso bond with a coloured underpainting before the painting begins.
Wilson’s characteristic swirling brushstrokes emerged during her MA at the Royal College of Art when the artist was trying to visually describe vegetal forms, delivering a tactile sense of fleshy vitality into which the figures are entangled. Over time, her textures have developed; foliage, fur, flesh and plant matter undulate together with the sense that something, down there, is very much alive. Figures are enmeshed within a web of wriggling movement. There is life in the bushes, there is life beneath the roots, there is life writhing within the land itself. Each brushstroke has no beginning and no end - it is impossible to pinpoint the first and last stroke, like the tangle of a thick undergrowth. The whole process draws parallels with nature’s constant changing, from sunrise to sunrise, from full moon to full moon.
In ‘July, Far Off I Fly’ and the diptych ‘The Asparagus Wedding’, the wooden boards feature a sloping frame which gently frames the figures and their stories. ‘The Asparagus Wedding’ was inspired by Italian Renaissance marriage portraiture (Piero della Francesca’s diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza), a genre usually accompanied by an elaborate frame, while maintaining a fairly intimate scale. In Wilson’s version, vegetal tendrils and green vines crawl out of the pictures’ boundaries, reaching for each other. Foliage grows across the borders and is simultaneously contained by it; nature is straining to reclaim its territory. ‘In May, I sing night and day’ and ‘Grotta’, depict nature at more advanced stages of smothering; plant matter clings directly to the subjects, creeping over and into their bodies. Is this a parasitic or symbiotic relationship? Wilson maintains an ambiguity here. These scenes could depict either violent tussles against nature or intimate moments of interspecies connection. We are invited to participate in the dialogue, navigating the potential of multiple interpretations in the work.
A bird appears in three paintings: il cuculo, the cuckoo. A parasite species, the cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species and their chicks are then fed by the host, to gross excess. Wilson drew inspiration from the British composer Benjamin Britten’s song, ‘Cuckoo!’ (1935) which describes the bird’s changing behaviour with the seasons. Heard singing in the woods during a research trip to Cornwall just before the residency, and then again every day during her month in Brescia, the cuckoo represents a link between home and Italy, being both a creature of the English countryside and the Mediterranean landscape as it migrates south before winter. The first few weeks of the bird’s life are depicted in ‘Heavy on the Chest’ and ‘In May, I sing night and day’: in the former, darker work, a reclining creature is weighed down, smothered by the demanding chick, bright and singing for food through the night. In the latter, the cuckoo’s claws are dug firmly into the arm of the creature, its relentless call directed into its ear. What could have been initially interpreted as an intimate scene of tenderness between two creatures is punctured by the brutality of nature. Wilson enacts a fragile balance between softness and violence. Mossy vines envelop the cuckoo and the creatures. Such is the power of summer and its undefeatable advance that covers everything in green, suffocating the landscape.
The moons in Wilson’s work are often a clue towards the mood of the painting. Appearing pale and cold or warm and yellow, the moons set these works at night, conveying something of the clandestine. In ‘Grotta’, a work directly inspired by the grotesque fountains in Palazzo Monti’s courtyard, Wilson’s swirling brushstrokes emulate the volcanic architecture of the fountain which hosts a scowling creature lurking in the water, wet for eternity.
The show concludes with a small series of coloured pencil drawings in red and green. Wilson’s works on paper take inspiration from medieval manuscripts and tapestries, particularly in their flowing linear quality. While being considered finished works on their own, these pieces formed the starting point of the residency for Wilson, allowing her to set the scene for the tales that would be told.
Wilson leads us through an entangled and strange world that, like a fairy tale, allows us to briefly suspend our disbelief until we eventually emerge, enchanted and somehow changed.
September 9 – October 15, 2023
