Gallery 1
4 Cromwell Place
South Kensington SW7 2JE
Stripped naked (save for some jewels) and chained to a rock as a sacrifice, the beautiful Andromeda is rescued from a sea monster by Perseus. Perseus marries Andromeda and makes her his queen. She bears him multiple children. Michael Taylor’s ‘Andromeda’s Torch’ has no obvious relation to this heroic tale in Greek Mythology beyond a moody sky, ominous shadows and some gestural marks that might be the debris from a storm. The painting’s title is more of a prop than a clue, one of several that Taylor uses to condition the picture plane, drawn from an inventory that includes palm trees, sunsets, oceans, shorelines, shadows, reflections, art historical references and flower arrangements. These ‘props’ represent visual or narrative tropes - feelings or associations that are familiar to the point of cliché. Taylor assembles these elements, moving them around from scene to scene as a way of thinking through the relationship between the natural world and human ideals. If experience is understood as something that is always to some extent mediated by our desires, then Taylor’s paintings play out the narratives we compose around our lives and selves, independent, and sometimes, in spite of, reality.
If, in reality, no man is an island, this fact stops no man from imagining himself as such. Taylor’s canvases are filled up like bottomless mimosas. Their soft fades accommodate dreams of escape, solitude, tragedy, heroism, rescue - every shade of ego. They are also deeply nostalgic, in the way holiday postcards are nostalgic, making you long for a holiday while you’re on it. The illusion is made clear. The hangover or undercurrent loiters in long shadows and swampy corners. Palm trees perform several roles. Limbs and fronds are mannered. Their lanky, sometimes languid, other-times alert figures frame scenes set for melodrama or its lingering aftermath. The awkward stems in Taylor’s still-lives behave similarly. He refers to them as “really bad arrangements”. In ‘Gauguin’s Kitchen’ the flowers are holding their composure but give the impression of being slightly fatigued by their vermillion backdrop. Vermillion returns as a vivid curtain in ‘The Tide Watcher’, where an absent protagonist has carefully arranged a designer chair against the setting sun.
Taylor’s palms and stems repeat the movement between painter and canvas, the backwards and forwards demanded by the making process. Rearranging props and tropes across the picture plane allows the artist to consider the spatial relations that shape narratives. By configuring and displacing objects, figures, interiors and landscapes, Taylor explores the storied construction of perception and personhood. It is a festive, campy exploration, where reality is pacified with evening cocktails and flattering lighting.
‘Islands’ is a space for projection, a collection of paintings that picture our desires, disappointments and the shimmering veneer of idealism.'
Text by Chloe Reid