Wynnie Mynerva, Bone of my Bones, Flesh of my Flesh

Gathering, London, 24 January - 4 March 2023

On the right-hand side of the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, a nude figure looks back at us over his muscled shoulder with alarm. He tries to swat something away beneath him, but too late – a demon has reached up with outstretched hand and poked him up his arse. In this painting, Michelangelo shows how the righteous are resurrected to eternal life and sinners cast into hell, but also reveals his fascination with the kind of sin that artists were paid to imagine in vivid detail, but forbidden to practise. Then, as now, hell was much more exciting than heaven. Just think of all those cultural references to Dante’s Paradiso.

Detail from the Last Judgement, completed 1541 (most of the clothes added later)

Wynnie Mynerva clearly feels a similar way. Their paintings are a writhing chaos of nude figures, buttocks and breasts, vaginas and scrotums and ejaculating penises, all slopping about over huge unstretched canvases in the dimly-lit newcomer to London’s gallery scene, the suitably industrial Gathering Gallery. The paintings are quite thrilling. It takes a minute to make sense of the gestural marks; then, as they congeal in the mind’s eye, some new fleshy appendage jumps out, like an uncertain stumble around an overcrowded steam room.

Drawing heavily on Christian images, Bone of my Bones, Flesh of my Flesh implicates its figures in a similar moral universe, though one in which the values are inverted. The exhibition text frames Mynerva’s work in terms of demonic forces suppressed by biblical tradition, who have liberated themselves from that patriarchy to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh free from guilt. The monumental paintings exult in throwing off this domination, implying that the alternative is precisely the orgiastic free-for-all that Christianity outlaws.

In so doing, Mynerva’s paintings revisit the same mode of gruesome horror and guilty arousal that painters of the Last Judgement enjoyed, and it’s still exciting and a bit naughty even in a post-Christian society. But, once you’ve spotted all the genitalia, the payoff starts to diminish, and the excitement wanes. The demons are liberated; are they going to do anything else? Transgression’s less transgressive when there’s nothing to transgress. Something is missing.

Wynnie Mynerva painting from the show

It dawns on me with the shock of a demon’s finger. They need heaven. Not to rain down fire and brimstone on the wicked, but because nowadays we’ve agreed that sex is ok. Paintings of sex often seem to be less a matter of hellfire than of peaceful goodwill, like waving the dearly departed along as they drift upwards on their heavenly journey. And after the initial excitement, you start to realise that hell can be a bit repetitive, and, let’s be honest, not exactly a massive burden on the intellect. In fact, it starts to seem like the boring bit of the Last Judgement has switched sides, and now it’s damnation that’s the staid and acceptable one. What would Wynnie Mynerva’s paintings look like if, instead, they were to burn with righteous scorn at their enemies? That could make for a lasting thrill.