How do you use a language to communicate different ideas, if the language itself limits the very structure of what we say? Take the matter of authorship, for example; it can even be difficult to untangle the claim to one’s own authorship—does it belong to me, or have I merely inherited it? It is an undeniable fact that we are obligated to remain within the structural and intellectual limits of convention: traditional ways of thinking, of expression, of behavior. The world around us and the point of view that we assume in observing it depend, therefore, upon pre-existing structures and a certain syntax of signification. Therefore, the mechanism that drives conceptual metaphors is not only the construction of language, but also the implicit language of thought and action. Like all languages, even painting can be included in this category as a kind of metanomic machine, one that contributes to symbolic activity characteristic to humankind. For Justin Fitzpatrick, painting is—above all—an instrument to circumvent the process of constructing a metaphor, in order to observe linguistic mechanisms, its conventions, and the syntax of narrative language.
Realism, dissolution, illogical movements, desire, and hyperbolic hallucinations are some of the themes that make up Fitzpatrick’s work. The metaphor becomes metamorphosis. The image doubles upon itself, upon looking and upon its own symmetry, turning upside-down and unveiling itself. The surface and its contents interbreed promiscuously, and the resulting visual contagions multiply like tentacles. The artist uses this fluctuation of meaning as a strategy, through which to generate new models—firstly, starting with the body. Aquarius Cat (Toilette), 2017, shows a cat drinking, the ingested water accumulating into a puddle under its tail; in Urinary Tract Infection, 2017, two crows are perched, ruminating and communicating through a strange tubular system that ends in a seashell-ashtray; in From Nest to Nation: A Cloacal Allegory, 2018, the digestive apparatus of a bird becomes an inundated village, the nerves of a leg morphing into calligraphic flourished. The metamorphoses here occur as a reciprocal exchange, between the internal and external, almost in allegorical play with the tension between the interiorization of guilt and shame, and the exterior forces of social influence. Furthermore, whether it is the physical presence of the objects, or the subsequent behavior that takes place throughout the piece—both aspects contribute either a psychological or moral.
The sculpture from the Underworld series, on display at Kevin Space in Vienna, embodies the figure of Thomas Aquinas; four legs of an Art Nouveau, with brushes attached. Thomas Aquinas had catalogued a sort of taxonomy of sexual sins; these sculptures function as allegorical representations of these sins: pulling-out, masturbation, and sodomy. Fitzpatrick adopts the body as a metaphor for social and sexual structures, upon which to verify mechanisms of thought, whether societal or economical. Consider that one of the first regulations of capitalism was to repurpose the body as a machine. During the transition from feudalism to capitalism, social reforms had rationalized the body according to the new bourgeois spirit, abolishing all superstition in favor of greater civil obedience. Indeed, the politicization of sexuality was present even from the Middle Ages, evidenced by religious legislation; however, it has been multiplied manifold in the advent of the modern era. The medieval body, with its magical powers, has been suppressed. This incompatibility between magic and capitalism was concretized in Descartes’ mechanic philosophy. Magic destroys industry, complained the philosopher Bacon. The process of modernization is described by Bruno Latour as a progressive “purification process”—of separating and cataloging, generally separating the things from their symbols from their meaning. Pre-modern times, on the other hand, combined all of them in a conception of the entire unit as a marriage between internal and external. It is not surprising, then, that Fitzpatrick refers precisely to this era of medieval iconography, to its tendency towards mutability with hazy borders. Like a retinal or electronic click, that activates and extinguishes in turn in an infinite visual loop of an Ouroboros, the work itself never emerges three-dimensionally; instead, it crystallizes into an impermanence that cannot be classified as neither abstract nor figurative, favoring neither the gesture nor the process. What is of interest to Fitzpatrick are the structures of signification that have the potential to be porous and open up. As follows, subjects that carry with them a blurry semiotic value reoccur often. Town Planners (Demi-Urges), 2017, takes the figure of the worker in the social imaginary of Socialism Realism, with its strong socialist and communist connotations, and re-interprets him through a homosexual lens, thus recasting the figure in an ambiguous role, becoming an archetypal symbol of masculinity and virility.
Animals, too, are often found in his work. They function as receptors of meaning, reflecting their unique position between identity and form. The cat, for instance, in Cat Infected with Daisies, 2017, and Libra Cat, Inner City, 2017, is often used in the artist’s iconographic vocabulary. The trope allows him to reference Art Nouveau, and its famous Parisian Le Chat Noir cabaret poster—and thus, along with Art Nouveau, comes the visual allegory of modernity. The artist shows a particular interest in Art Nouveau as a tool to analyze the relationship between ornamentation and excess. In the famous text by Adolf Loos, ornament was considered a crime. A new decree was issued: modernist, normative, and censorial. New rules were in place, after those that had ushered in the elaborate feet of the furniture, so popular across Victorian salons! The ornamentation of Art Nouveau signaled a new threshold between the inside and outside, with its serpentine iron lines winding its way to the entrance of buildings, doors, and subways. The metaphor becomes metamorphosis, in this case, in terms of its interchangeable physicality; here, one body flows into another, sinuously. This serpentine motif is also present in Self-Digestion Sigil, 2017, though taken from medieval heraldry, used in terms of its physiological function. The work connects to the idea that the modern era has developed an obsession with excrement, reflecting the disgust of the capitalist bourgeoisie for non-productive parts of the human body; indeed, for the Puritans, excrement was the symbol of human corruption. Additionally, in his text Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin refers to the “grotesque” as a typically medieval state, in which the conception of the body is more communal, without any sort of physiological repression. In his interpretation, the inside and the outside are both allowed, without any reservations whatsoever. There, the land of Cockaigne still exists, the precursor to the modern Utopia.
Fitzpatrick’s work presents an extravaganza, composed of floral and zoomorphic motifs that interchangeably stand in for ideas of triviality or offence. He composes, in effect, a subtle satire—based on the idea of the double—that does not allow for any hierarchy nor censorship often found within modernist dogma and the social regulation of the body. The colors used in his paintings refer to paintings much prior, particularly the pinks and blues that often formed the architectural background to frescoes—tracing back to the subdued tones of Fra Angelico, to the same shades taken by De Chirico, and even to the magazine cover of the 70s and 80s. Fitzpatrick’s porous images attempt to reveal the relationship between history and images, between legibility and visibility. In his work, the image does not shy away from contamination of excess, nor of decorative layering. Art Nouveau, the simultaneous language of medieval iconography, aesthetics associated with academic and stereotypical Socialist Realism, and queer references all come together in an indistinguishable mix, with an elegant openness that turns the human mechanics of making meaning upside-down.
