All the riches in the night
The catalogue accompanying Chris Worfold 's latest body of work, collectively titled All the Riches in the Night, included a series of quotes, gathered together by the artist under the title 'Vanitas'. Drawn from a myriad of sources, they offered a fabulous dialogue (as Pat Hoffie observed in her catalogue essay) between popular culture and the highbrow. Worfold cites St. Augustine alongside Nick Cave, Eric Fischl and David Cronenberg, in a conflation of histories and styles.
He quotes Joel Peter Witkin, 'I want to live in an age which sees similar beauty in a flower and in the severed limb of a human being'; Eric Fischl, 'An artist should be able to imagine heaven and hell vividly, both from the point of view of the devil and from the side of those who are tormented. You should be able to understand the pleasure of the badness'; and horror meister David Lynch who sedately observes, 'there are things that they wouldn 't understand as much as some others, but abstractions are a good thing and they exist all around us anyway'. Worfold avoids explaining his rational for including these collected observations, and while it is tempting to read the works in the light of these isolated statements, it is not entirely productive to do so. This new suite of paintings finds the artist in a dark realm indeed, so perhaps these quotes should be read as metaphorical illuminations, at best.
Worfold's work involves a contemporary blending of the sacred and the profane. On one level, his realist paintings evoke Dutch and Italian memento mori paintings: Dead Girl pictures a skull, seen from below, beautifully painted, and floated on a rich black