ZOE YOUNG

The Sentimental Bloke

MCEC (Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre)

20 Feb 2025 – 23 Feb 2025

“This city that cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things (s)he wants to remember.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Unexpected beginnings
The history of still-life, if you peek behind the curtain, is also the history of erotica. Outwitting the un-initiated through symbolism to reveal subtle, and very unsubtle, depictions of pure bacchanal. “Coorte, no more pornographic paintings”, “OK I'll just be over here painting a hunted bird”, code: copulate, (Adiaen Coorte, Still Life with Three Medlars and a Butterfly, 1705); “You too Osias, mind out of the gutter”, “Think I'll paint some oysters over there with Coorte then”, code: eroticism, (Osias Beert the Elder, Dishes with Oysters, Fruit, and Wine, 1620/24). “Michelangelo, really, we’re back making homoerotic paintings again”, “Sorry, I’ll go back to rendering these sweet, sweet voluptuous peaches in the corner I guess”, code: vulva/ass, (Caravaggio, Still Life with Fruit, 1603). The point, crudely made, is that the genre of still life has, at its best, been one of secret meaning, subterfuge and symbolism.
Life isn't still
Western art history largely excluded still-life paintings by women until the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), are exceptions, but often their subjects were restricted to the domestic and servile spaces of the home. Soon after, artists such as Gluck (1895–1978) and Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) brought new symbologies and forms to still life indicative of a non-gendered and fluid body, questioning patriarchy that designated women to roles of domesticity and child-bearing.
Harbour city
Sydney for me had to be a break-up. It eats its young and unprivileged and displaces whoever cannot pay, or ignores its rules. I’m fine (now), but I wonder, looking at Zoe Young’s paintings, if the break-up was so amicable for her. Through painting, she collages the ideals of the city, that sit out of reach for so many; the expansive balconies with more expansive views, tropical fruit and flowers, poolside days. And Gertrude Stein novels, which Zoe, and I, can still mostly afford.
Food
The still life seems lifeless without food: grapes, lemons, shellfish, dead animals, rotting fruit, peaches to squeeze. In Tender Buttons Gertrude Stein conjures “a shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all.” Young looks to such domestic stuff with the contempt, longing and revulsion that Stein implores. They become materials, like the paint from her brush, to critique and remake her own, including the fantasies and exclusions of a city, false memories created from perfect friends and polished reels and the broken dreams of a Sydney that we had to leave.
Segue
Whores for Gloria, the 1991 novel by William Tanner Vollmann, chronicles Jimmy as he engages sex workers in a fantastical attempt at formalising an imagined, ideal woman that exists as a fugitive memory. As Jimmy sleazes and fucks and defiles his way toward imaging this ideal woman – "hellishly beautiful breasts", with eyes from one, hair from another, a pussy from over there – we are struck by how powerful illusion, memory and nostalgia can be when ideas transgress reality. Zoe Young’s exhibition, The Sentimental Bloke, derives from Vollmann’s novel, and the obscurity of her titling becomes clear through the artists search for ideals that don't, and perhaps never existed, through heavy-leaning into the rich genre of still life in all its multitudinal forms and meanings. Both Jimmy and Young debase, devour and possess their subjects in an attempt to reach something unknown, unreal, pure yet totally unattainable.

Justin Balmain