Ella Bertilsson: Slippery Like Mango Juice
Horse gallery, Dublin
★★★★☆
Ella Bertilsson has had a busy few months. First she collaborated with Kathy Tynan and Emily Waszak on the well-received Faigh Amach exhibition, at Temple Bar Gallery & Studios. Now the Sweden-born artist has a solo show, Slippery Like Mango Juice, at the Horse, around the corner from the Hugh Lane Gallery. Not every artist could pull off parallel exhibitions, but Bertilsson is clearly in a dynamic mode.
Bertilsson’s practice spans narrative-driven installations, sculpture, film, performance, sound, drawing and painting. Her aesthetic instincts are oriented towards the kitsch, the crudely commercial, the degraded and ugly, as well as towards street art, found art, outsider art.
Pallets of Lucozade bottles prop up video monitors, and Angry Bird-style heads litter the gallery floor. The figures that populate Bertilsson’s paintings look like cartoons from X-rated stoner comic strips from the 1970s. She has drawn titles directly on to the surface of the paintings, leaning into the comic-panel aesthetic. Corpses, often dismembered, are a motif in the artist’s work, brightly lit in the colours of her gaudy, bombastic palette. There is violence here, simmering below the playful surface.
Bertilsson’s sculpture installation Cactus Dancer speaks to this tension: a cartoonlike inflatable tube, designed to look like a flailing cactus, turns on at intervals, without warning, its wacky, smiling face hitting the gallery ceiling. Sometimes it lurches at visitors with enough speed to make them jump backwards. The sound is crucial: compressed air shrieks as it rushes into the inflatable, which then makes a deafening slapping noise as it jerks this way and that. It all stops just as suddenly, Cactus Dancer becoming a quiet though gleeful cadaver after falling to the ground.
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Reflecting on Sun Ra’s influence on him, the artist Mike Kelley once explained that “you should not talk down to your audience” and instead use “popular modes of address that are radically transformed – perverted, even.” Bertilsson has absorbed similar lessons; their sensibilities converge in a mishmash of commercial brio and cult-like aesthetics.
That said, Bertilsson also shows her contemplative side: the video installation Broken Heart Creek features two panels of a click-and-drag Google Maps journey, narrated by the artist, which is edited to make it sound like two people in discussion.
Her voice softly ruminates on the sense of dislocation and alienation she experienced while living in Los Angeles. The genuinely felt diarism of this work creates an intriguing oscillation within the exhibition as a whole, a lone counterpoint that returns you to an unadorned intimacy.
Slippery Like Mango Juice is at the Horse gallery, Dublin, until Saturday, October 4th
