julie reeves—recent paintings
The link between ornament, decoration and visual seduction can be dated back to antiquity. Ancient critics reviled ornament for its ability to hide faults in the underlying form, which needed to be displayed in an unadorned state to emphasise its purity. This argument addressed art and architecture as much as speech, music or even women's make-up. The emerging dichotomy (ornament equals seduction and treachery; lack of ornament equals honesty and moral rectitude) was compounded during the Enlightenment, where philosophers such as Diderot felt compelled to choose between two mutually exclusive paths: a life of licentious hedonism as a libertine, or the path of moral righteousness as an home sensible. 1
Early twentieth century modern architects Le Corbusier and Amedee Ozenfant continued this quest for purity, rejecting the fashionable and over-decorated schemes of the previous century which appeared suffocating and retrograde in the face of the new era of industry. In an attempt to link architecture and life, the domestic interior was developed as a 'machine for living in', and the new, pared-back forms were later accompanied by the phrase 'less is more'.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries visual artists have revisited the seductive powers of decoration in a positive way that distinguishes the new artistic practice from the previous modernist ideology and offers an alternative voice that resonates with overt sensuality. From the work of Peter Greenaway, Sally Potter's Orlando, to Cindy Sherman's photographs of sumptuous, neo-baroque scenes from art history, the retina, and the intellect, has been stimulated in a way that had not been experienced for a century. Imagery, enriched with an abundance of texture and pattern, applied with ornamentation that became so overwhelming as