Whatiftheworld is proud to present Saltwater altar, a solo exhibition by Oliver Scarlin.

“To paint a subject from life is itself an act of love. Painting the portrait of a live sitter requires an intense, scouring kind of looking; a sustained acute attention – the type of gaze reserved mostly for lovers. Devotional art carries a similar kind of principle, inasmuch as the artwork itself is understood as the outcome of a period of religious reflection. What is left in the form of the painting is a trace of the artist-subject relation, a documentation of that exchange.

Scarlin’s sitters feel both intensely present – rendered with such deliberate care – and alienated, perhaps via the exact same means. Scarlin’s soft, translucent brushwork over warm-toned underpainting produces the subjects in a glowy haze, petrified as though in a dream or by a spell. The object paintings too have this sense of uncanny warmth and stillness. One recurrent object is a white goblet (the original ceramic, from which the paintings were observed, was also made by Scarlin) which is shown in Saltwater altar, alongside a selection of shells, as the centrepiece for an oceanic shrine. In Saltwater goblet (Harry) Scarlin’s partner is pictured holding the same vessel, sea waves gentle in a lilac twilight behind him. His expression is mournful, diffident; he gazes away. The image calls to mind the Greek myth of Ganymede, a Trojan youth so beautiful he was abducted by the gods, granted immortality, and made to serve as Zeus’s cup-bearer. Depictions of Zeus and Ganymede have historically provided a means for artists to represent male nudes in scenes of homoerotic passion through the ‘serious’ subject matter of mythological painting. The painting is also reminiscent of the Page of Cups tarot card. The Page is always portrayed as a lone young man, and often signifies the start of a journey or undertaking. Cups, a metonym for water itself, is the suit of creativity, emotion and intuition. Here, the cup gives shape to the vast, unpredictable ocean, containing and subduing it. Harry offers the cup – and himself – as muse.

These mythological and occult references coexist in Scarlin’s work with a distinctly old-fashioned formalism. Medieval frescos; the blocky figuration of Diego Rivera; the mystical painting of William Blake and the symbolists; Henry Scott Tuke’s hazy beachside scenes of idyllic homosociality; the hearty, smooth-skinned youths of 1930s propaganda imagery – both communist and fascist – all emerge as potential visual sources. One commonality between these styles is that they largely predate the dawn of post-modernism, and the fundamental rupture to our ways of seeing the world that it catalysed. This shift includes the concretation of queer identity categories, and the proliferation of various media representing queerness. The anachronism of Scarlin’s work reflects our strange times. The fascistic turn of Global North politics creates ripples in South Africa: access to gender-affirming hormones, HIV prophylaxis and treatment, and other health services is no longer a given for queer people. People must hold one another a little tighter. Knowledge becomes a scarce resource, and the truth too slippery to grasp. Images with no physical counterparts are dreamed up by machines and roughened with synthetic brushstrokes. Our internet bustles with nonexistent people; real people outsource their thoughts and feelings to AI.

A Sword in a storm (Niamh) depicts a youth in front of a turbulent sea. Their posture is soft yet defiant; their gaze direct and challenging. In their left hand is a sword. In the Tarot, swords is the suit of knowledge and intellect, but also frequently indicates trouble for the querent. It is unclear whether the painting’s subject is the bringer of the storm, or is stationed as a defense against it. The futility of the latter interpretation – perhaps also a reference to Caligula’s mad command that his soldiers wage war on Poseidon by stabbing the sea – is reflective of the kinds of hubristic tales that crop up in the Tarot: ultimately, no degree of military strategy or human engineering can match the elemental force of the ocean. The sea embodies the fluidity and openness of queerness and queer relationality, while also being a site of cosmic horror. The sea, even when it is merely a suggested horizon, is as much of a subject in Scarlin’s work as his sitters are. In the two sculptural works included on the show, figures emerge from thigh-deep water, its waves and geometric ripples coaxed from clay – water’s obverse.

The slow intentionality of Scarlin’s method is what is most affecting about the work: the part that is visible via paint and clay is the product of a longer process of attention paid to the subject through looking, incorporating, interpreting and reproducing their form. That each sitter is also an actual queer person who exists in and moves through the city means that these paintings are also documents, in all their stillness, of moments in larger, more complex lives in relation.”

(Text by Max Law)