Séraphine Pick 'Devil’s Music'

‘The people that crowd Pick’s broadly brushed new canvasses are almost frightening in their intensity. There is something uncomfortably primal about all that unexplained feeling: these faces remind us how little it takes to revert to the impulses of superstition and violence.’1

Leonardo da Vinci’s reputedly original painting ‘Salvator Mundi’ was sold by Christie’s in New York in 2017 and holds the record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. During the international marketing program before the auction, Christie’s produced a 4:14 minute video ‘The Last da Vinci: The World is Watching’ in which viewers of the painting react passionately to what they see from the confines of a darkened room. But…the da Vinci itself, the ultimate subject of the campaign that achieved that 450-million-dollar record, is never shown. It remains unseen. Christie’s leave us to see only the emoted faces of people viewing the painting.

This is a powerful ploy that is very common in cinema. Hitchcock and other masters of the horror genre are often loathed to show us the explicit horror of their ways, but rather direct long takes of an actor’s face, shocked and frightened, reacting instinctively to what they are seeing. In cinema, this is how to truly populate fear in an audience.

At the time of ‘Devil’s Music’, 2009, which was shown in her Christchurch survey show in November of that year, Séraphine Pick was producing figurative paintings often surreal in impulse and cinematic in scale. Figurative painting, yes, because the earlier pre-millennial works were bleached-out mindscapes with thought bubbles. But now there is flesh on the bone to her figures as if Hieronymus Bosch had intervened and sent her off to make fearsome graduates of his style from distant corners of the internet.

In this painting, the romanticism of family camping trips and roasting marshmallows over an open fire is upended as the tone is more sinister. Nine figures gather, perhaps more. That’s a complex lot for portraiture. The painting is dark and true to the tactics of Hitchcock, the campfire of fear rages mostly off screen, but it throws an unrelenting light at the gathering of young participants. It has a bleaching effect like the limelight set at the front of the stage in early 20th century music halls where the actors could move between bawdy parody and distilled fear in seconds with a facial switch from mockery to grimace.

Here, Pick’s characters are timeless. They are humbly dressed without costuming, so could just as easily be Bosch protagonists as Gen Z, or even a sinister fireside grouping from William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. Hands fall painted loosely to the sides and offer no clue through gesture. But here, facial expression is everything. The grimacing and clown-like adornments are immediately frightening. Human curiosity is on trial as the viewer strains into the canvas to try and learn more and settle once and for all what the painting is about.

Pick’s characters gaze out at the viewer, yet these characters hold back from telling all. Are they witnessing a medieval sacrifice? Are they striking out from a place of human vulnerability as William Golding’s young men did, to question savagery and power? Are they questioning, as Milburn suggests, a spirit of malevolence that can hide in individuals but rise up in a group playing the ‘Devil’s Music’ in refrain?

Peter James Smith

1. Felicity Milburn, ‘Hole in the Sky/Devil’s Music’, in Felicity Milburn and Lara Strongman Seraphine Pick, Christchurch Art Gallery, 2009, p.161