TODD LAMBETH: "Oh! You Pretty Things," Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, May 17 to June 15, 2013

×

1 of 4

Expand

"Zuma"

Todd Lambeth, "Zuma," 2012, oil on canvas, 12” x 14”.

×

2 of 4

Expand

"Murray"

Todd Lambeth, "Murray," 2012, oil on canvas, 14” x 14”.

×

3 of 4

Expand

"Zuma"

Todd Lambeth, "Zuma," 2012, oil on canvas, 12” x 14”.

×

4 of 4

Expand

"Ziggy"

Todd Lambeth, "Ziggy," 2012, oil on canvas, 12” x 14”.

Prev

Next

TODD LAMBETH

Oh! You Pretty Things

Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria

May 17 to June 15, 2013

By John Luna

In the pristine hanging space of Deluge Contemporary Art, sunlight from south-facing windows tickles 15 small, discretely framed paintings of cats. “We thought we’d better hang it straight,” remarks Todd Eacrett, a board member of the gallery; he is gamely alluding to the notion that the populist subject might hazard turning the show into a novelty, that there is something about cats in particular that makes the paintings less serious, more solicitous, felicitous, even cute.

The paintings were made from photographs sent to Victoria-based artist Todd Lambeth in response to a request he made on Facebook. Lambeth plays it straight too: the pets are painted in subdued tones that subtly unify the series – olives, golds, oxide reds and washed-out whites. Tender pinks render the insides of ears, a nose, a single, outthrust paw. Rather than black, an inky ultramarine shift hints at the source of the images: digital pictures (the place where most of us now store memories) possess both a nearness and transience that make older photos stolid placards; blue as the ephemeral glow of laptops in dim living rooms. 

Though the pictures are representational, they are also, as the gallery’s media release notes, meditations on colour and form. Lambeth clearly enjoys the close vicissitudes of flat oil paint, and the paintings feature an alluring use of brushwork to alternately charge void space with feeling or solid bodies with indistinct reckoning, in a way that recalls the atmospheric interiors of American realist Edward Hopper. There’s a touch of nostalgia, but also uncertainty in Hopper’s painting, and maybe in Lambeth’s too, that life should be regarded so reticently as to become “still life.”

“I’m fascinated in the domestic spaces, how the cat can become an accessory,” Lambeth says in an interview. But it’s clear the cat is more than a paperweight or placeholder. He talks of “seeing a cat reclining, and knowing the warmth of that, and the texture of that, and the relationship of that.” This linkage between seeing, touching and relating has deep historical roots. Lambeth mentions 18th century painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, whose renditions of fish just-short-of-spoiled on the kitchen table, or game birds strung up to season, remind us that the French call still life nature morte. Painterly tension quickens death into life.

Lambeth’s cats are not necessarily dead, but they have passed into the artificial preserve of the photographed. Is this what Lambeth means when he says the pictures “somehow act as mirrors?” He painted the cats after a traumatic accident left him with a shattered foot; he was unable to stand, and painted while convalescing. Several look straight at the viewer with that gaze of interrupted dignity so common to photographed animals. Others slumber with exposed tummies, lazily ecstatic. Lambeth notes elements in the work refer to historical paintings of reclining figures. This interpretation adds insight to his choice of poses, recalling a lineage of painters – from Manet to Lucian Freud – whose subjects can communicate to the viewer some sense of the fatigue of the regarded, a fatigue that, when we regard ourselves, we sometimes fail to notice.

Click for video interview of Lambeth by Michael Cox.