Mat Collishaw has had a thing about flowers, artistically speaking, since the 1990s, when, he says, contemporary artists weren’t really interested. His new exhibition focuses on flowers all right, but does it through unnatural means including AI, 3D printing and NFTs – the grim acronyms of modernity. If you’re after lovely botanical pictures you may be discombobulated.
What’s interesting is that Collishaw plays with the technical toolbox of the 21st century but addresses the themes and art of the past in disconcerting ways. The first two images are lovely botanical drawings – but by Albrecht Durer, 1520. Clever Collishaw has brought them to life. Durer’s Great Piece of Turf, a beautiful take on a patch of weeds, moves in an invisible virtual wind and the water below dimples and shimmers. It’s digital magic, meticulously done.
The Venal Muse is taken from casts of orchids, manipulated to mimic venereal disease; some are fleshy, bloody or distorted. These are Beaudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, all right. Shades, too, of the decadent JK Husyman’s A Rebours, about a recluse whose taste for beauty degenerated into an obsession with the warped and diseased.
A series of what look like beautiful Dutch-style oil paintings isn’t what it seem either. Look closely: the flower petals resemble insect wings. Collishaw used AI to combine seventeenth century still lifes with the parameters of insect bodies to create arrangements of insectified flowers, like those children’s picture puzzles where you have to find the hidden elements. Other artists do the painting; Collishaw is composer and conductor.
Old Masters feature in one video but they’re on the walls of a ruined room in the National Gallery, recreated as it might be if humanity had perished and vegetation had taken over – a take on the old memento mori idea.
Collishaw is intrigued by Victorian technology. A technique to project a reflected image called Pepper’s Ghost is used here in a huge slowly revolving, spectral double image of an old oak in Sherwood Forest, captured with a laser scanner. A metaphor for Brexit, apparently.
As for Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs), they feature in extraordinary projections of opening flower heads, bespoke digital blooms. It’s Collishaw’s take on the Dutch Tulip mania.
The bells and whistles of new tech are all over this small show, yet it plays with tradition. It doesn’t quite hang together but it’s full of ideas. Something old, something new and much of it unsettling.
