Marcus Nelson
7 April - 29 April 2022
Eve Leibe Gallery, London
In this exhibition, Nelson creates a melancholic environment for the damned to come to life. Acting as a portal to another world, Lost Boys invites the viewer to witness the inner workings of the artist's mind and question what it means to be human.
Using an abundance of art historical references from, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, (1536-1541), to Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (c.1308-1321), Nelson fragments classicism and mines historical narrative and imagery to explore issues of masculinity in the present day. Blue and green hues produce bruise-like clouds that set the scene for his floating figures. A bruise is a bodily response to impact and when used as a backdrop for the figures in Nelson’s compositions, a perfect landscape for exploring the body and internalised pain emerges. Pathetic fallacy is utilised as a device in Nelson’s work, where deep blues assimilate dark emotions and link to the weather in Dante’s Hell, where ‘… rain falls there, endlessly, chill, accursed and heavy’ Inferno, Canto 6, Line 7-8. In Under a Bruised Sky, figures are cramped and confined by the perimeters of the canvas in an invasion of personal space; highlighting feelings of claustrophobia, whilst simultaneously creating a setting for the viewer to position themselves within. The use of repetitive forms and overlapping limbs play into the sensical and nonsensical narrative of this work, where flayed and stripped-backed figures are both conjoined and disconnected in an internalised dialogue; posing questions of the self and whether these figures represent an individual, a collective, a thought or a feeling.
In Lost Boys, Nelson uses space to explore the abyss, in both a physical and emotional sense. Within the canvas, he offers a stage for his figures to become vulnerable, and in this exhibition, he relocates the space within his mind and opens the door for the viewer to enter, paying homage to Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell (1880-c.1890). The fabrication of this fictitious environment gives the exhibition its title: referencing J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), Neverland is an imaginary island that houses the Lost Boys and characters who refused to grow up. Acting s a metaphor for immortality and escapism, Nelson creates a space, where one can access their own Neverland and consequently explore the demons that live within it.
︎ Exhibition: Eve Leibe Gallery
Marcus Nelson, Lost Boys, Installation View, 7 April - 29 April 2022, Eve Leibe Gallery, London.