PORTAL PAINTERS | PETER LAYZELL
Portal Painters have been building up their stable of artists for over 60 years, and they have a distinct MO, when it comes to choosing who to represent. The gallery use the term ‘idiosyncratic’: their painters’ styles are instantly recognisable, once you have seen a piece of their work.
They go for figurative painters, generally with an offbeat approach. Beryl Cook is the most famous among them: Portal, when it ran a gallery, put on no fewer than 18 Beryl Cook shows. Kit Williams is another, of Masquerade fame. Irvine Peacock, Reg Pepper, Mick Rooney. There are nearly thirty more.
Director Jess Wilder has chosen Peter Layzell’s latest work, Artist and Model, to be shown here, an oil painting on panel which will be on sale during the Fair. It’s visually arresting, of course, and becomes even more interesting when you discover its subject matter.
Over to Layzell: “[Renaissance artist] Artemisia Gentileschi, though brilliantly gifted, was nevertheless excluded from the life room as a young painter. So in the absence of live models, [she] set up mannequins which were posed, costumed and lit in the Baroque manner. This painting freely imagines the young ambitious Artemisia in her studio with her model.”
There’s an interesting Las Meninas-style meta-dynamic to the work. Within the picture, we can see the painting of the mannequin, and we are directed through the painter/model’s eyes towards the object she’s painting (or its nipple, to be precise). But we can’t see the mannequin itself, it is out of frame. Layzell has conjured the sense of the mannequin, which thus achieves an almost tangible existence. All this draws the audience further into the visual narrative.
And all that detail! The beautiful face of the model; the gorgeous red jacket she’s wearing; the two, very different gloves. And that plastic mask with its cheap elasticated strap, one of two indications that the scene has been transposed from the Renaissance era into modern times.
It is a painting that raises more questions than it answers. Why has ‘Artemisia’ tipped her mask onto her head? What does the mask represent? And is the artist playing with the viewers by purposefully distorting his ‘male gaze’ in a painterly hall of mirrors?
Portal Painters will be positioned at Stand 51 of the Fair, showing Andrew Scott George, Steve Easby, Whyn Lewis, James McNaught, Heather Nevay, Joseph O’Reilly, Lizzie Riches, Ben Unsworth and Peter Unsworth, as well as Peter Layzell.