Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present Afterparty, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with UK-based artist Jonathan Wateridge. The exhibition features paintings that are situated within the construct of an aspirational, affluent anyplace, where formally distressed figures appear haunted by the threat of their own disappearance. Afterparty will be on view in the Soho gallery from September 6 - October 21, 2023.
In Afterparty’s anguished phantasia, liminal, sometimes translucent figures flicker and fade throughout halls, terraces, and pathways. Men and women are captured mid-movement, either surprised by the painter’s intervention or unaware of it entirely. Their mask-like faces regard the viewer beseechingly, or else they lethargically melt into chairs, couches and beds. Often reduced to a series of expressionistic gestures, their bodies succumb to the voracious maw of their surrounding environments. For instance, in Host (all works 2023), a woman stands on a manicured walkway, her ghostlike legs revealing the stones behind them, and her neck and left arm partially replaced by the foliage encircling her. A fulgent glow vibrates around many of the figures’ contours, enhancing the sense that they are spectral: between the viewer’s world, the world of the painting, and yet another, ethereal world of dematerialized formlessness.
Afterparty is a development of the thematic and formal concerns explored in Aftersun, which the artist exhibited at our Brussels gallery last year. In Afterparty, Wateridge moves his subjects away from the poolside scenes they inhabited for the past six years, instead immersing them in adjacent garden spaces and interiors of modernist homes. Glass surfaces of midcentury architecture supplant the pool as a motif of inverted good life optimism, instead crystallizing the social and class anxieties that subtend such notions of prosperity. While, in Aftersun, the pool was a signifier of social exclusion, in Afterparty, glass acts as an unseen boundary or screen, reflecting and obscuring as much as it reveals.
Formally, Afterparty negotiates a collision between modernist visual grammars and cinematic pictorial spaces. Many features of the paintings’ settings – the trees and paneling in Open House, the rain dotting the windowpanes in Downpour – impart a filmic realism, characteristic of Wateridge’s earlier work, to the paintings. However, Wateridge’s semi-abstracted figures jar against these backdrops. Juxtaposed with their more faithfully rendered environments, the splintered figures function as a formal interruption. Additionally, the paintings’ surfaces suffer varying degrees of attrition, having been scraped in some passages and sanded down in others. Yet other areas are crusted over with formations of excess paint, a palimpsestic byproduct of Wateridge’s revisions playing across the paintings’ surfaces. Wateridge’s effacement of form and surface points to the effacement of his figures’ unstable social formations.
As with past work by Wateridge, the figures in Afterparty are engulfed by threat, their quiet terror of decadent decline materializing through their fragmented forms. But this new body of work develops a new kind of daylight horror, a menacing aesthetic that issues from the banality of daytime, from light and visibility rather than from shadowed obscurity. In Glasshouse, a man stands behind a sliding glass door, his forearm disconnected from the rest of his body, and his neck obscured by the reflection of a tree on the opposite side of glass. The man’s tall stature and posture are jeopardized, a condition that is augmented by his body’s formal incompleteness. Here, glass – a material that normally imparts greater clarity – reflects light in a way that shrouds what lies on the other side of the divide.
The fractured forms that characterize the figure in Glasshouse are echoed throughout the other works in the exhibition, whether the figures are separated from the viewer by glass or not. In Bedspread, for instance, a man lies languidly on a made bed, his limbs disconnected from his torso as though he were melting into the fabric beneath. And in Red Curtain, a woman’s hollowed out eyes reveal the fabric curtains behind her, transforming her face into a floating mask. The figures’ bodies are therefore reduced to surfaces themselves, though they are markedly less stable than those of their surrounding interiors to which they cling so tightly.
Jonathan Wateridge (b. 1972, Lusaka, ZM; lives and works in Norfolk, UK) has most recently exhibited with the Hayward Gallery, London; T.J. Boulting, London; Galerie Haas, Zurich; Pace Gallery and HENI, London. Wateridge’s work is in the collections of institutions worldwide, including Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; Pinault Foundation, Venice; the Saatchi Collection, London; the Rennie Collection, Vancouver; and Simmons & Simmons, London.