Lydia Blakeley: The High Life
Southwark Park Galleries, 10 July - 4 September 2022
Lydia Blakeley’s The High Life at Southwark Park Gallery is centred around a humorous series of sun loungers from which Blakeley has removed the seats, replacing them with canvases painted with an iconography of summer: aeroplanes, seafood, swimming pools, water slides, cool boxes, blue skies, etc. Bringing classic images of summer onto the ultimate instrument of relaxation, these chairs are a potent symbol for the holiday pleasures we all desire. Around the walls are paintings on a similar theme: Mediterranean-looking cactus gardens, sun loungers and palm trees, the sky from plane windows, a restaurant with tables prepared, octopus, oysters, shrimps, crabs, herrings.
I have one or two bones to pick. First, the exhibition booklet is misleading. The curators seem to want to squeeze some kind of critique of the Easyjet holiday out of the paintings, but there is no such critique on offer here. The act of reproducing promotional photographs in paint does not ‘suspend those fleeting and aspirational scenes for the viewer’s contemplation’ so much as enhance the allure of the referent and increase our desire for what they promise, especially as they are painted so gorgeously and with such skill. The sun loungers produce an intensification of longing, not distance from it: you could stick them in the business lounge of the airport if you were in the mood for cruel mockery of the people preparing to spend their week in board meetings.
I neither care nor am I convinced by the assertion that ‘Blakeley takes the 1995 Microsoft advertising campaign Where do you want to go today? as a point of departure’. There’s no trace of it in the work. Nor do I believe that ‘she reinforces the feeling of longing for escape that is not quite within reach’. The whole point of budget air travel is that it’s very much within reach for very many people. And that’s precisely the problem: at the scale they’re consumed, the flights and delicious seafood that Blakeley depicts cannot remain innocent symbols of pleasure. They also signify the death of the skies and the death of the oceans. Worse, it’s all our fault. Take another look at the paintings. They're not about critique: they’re about confession.
Confession that the content of these images is precisely what we desire, and when we fulfil that desire it feels great. Confession that even though cheap air travel belches CO2 into the atmosphere, we’re still getting on that plane to Majorca. Confession that, yes, the seas are despoiled, bleached and choking with plastic, but life is too short not to try the grilled octopus and, anyway, I’m on holiday, so give me a break. Confession also that, even though we might try to load our experience of painting with the often mystificatory baggage of ‘critique’, the medium is still, above all, about pleasure.
It's as if The High Life says that deep within every human being is a sinew of evil, and, tragically, it’s tugging on precisely this sinew that gives access to some of life’s most satisfying pleasures.
Fortunately, Blakeley spares us too harsh a confrontation with this truth. Because just like the holidays they show, these paintings are all about escape. I’ll hold my hands up: literally the day before I visited the exhibition I was lying on a deck chair on the aforementioned Balearic island, by a swimming pool, slowly getting sunburnt and eating grilled fish. Back in London, I was sad that my holiday was over. But during the time I spent in The High Life I was right back there, soaking it up, and that’s exactly where I wanted to be.