After Us, the Flood

David Charlie

Essay by Luce Reeves-Smith
 

Generally regarded as a nihilistic and self-indulgent expression of indifference to what exists beyond the self, and since interpreted as a portent of the cataclysmic Revolution to come, the quote “Après moi, le déluge” (after me, the flood) attributed to French king Louis XV, is today recast in the eyes of contemporary artist David Charlie. In our age of overwhelming visual stimulus, which we create and consume in equal measure, Charlie’s re-engagement with the past and his own visual archive of two decades generates a flood “not of destruction, but of memory, of meaning, of everything we’ve set in motion, knowingly or not.” With a clarity that comes with hindsight, and reframing past experiences through a retrospective Queer lens, Charlie’s works reunite disparate visual elements into complex and playful tableaux. Fluidly combining printed photomedia with hand-painted interventions and overlaid decorative arabesques and heraldic icons, Charlie’s works present a glutenous “more is more” approach to the picture’s surface. A uniformity of scale, perspective, and lighting is abandoned in favour of the creation of a fantastical dreamscape that draws from an unrestricted fount of images, from the artist’s own archives and also the wealth of imagery accessible in the 21st century.

Charlie’s bacchanalian scenes of explicit excesses take as much as they can from the world in which we live. In his work, the inherently observational nature of photomedia is compounded by the tyranny of distance imposed on Antipodean creatives, still today consuming masterpieces of European art history through printed and pixelated images. With poses drawn from these and from magazines, erotica, classical sculpture, and mythology, Charlie’s subjects step into stage sets richly modelled on overly canonised artistic compositions and motifs: Salomé with a severed head, Manet’s Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Millais’ Ophelia and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and Alma-Tadema’s Roses of Heliogabalus - itself an image of suffocating excess. These are again filtered through a contemporary perspective, one that has seen the same flood of roses in American Beauty, or that equates the trio of urinating imps with the socked antics of Red Hot Chilli Peppers bandmates in the 1990s. The playful enactment of hedonistic, often homoerotic, fantasies are idealised acts of projection, offering the saccharine fetishism of Koons’ Made in Heaven billboards or the surreal collaged effect of James Gleeson’s many macho nudes in psychoscapes.

“Time doesn’t behave properly in these works. It collapses, stretches, folds back on itself. Figures repeat, multiply, fragment.” Charlie’s images carry deep personal weight. They are populated by people who have shaped the artist’s life across several decades of artistic practice. The artistinvited these subjects back to reshoot and rework elements in the present-day. Thus, both the artist and the sitters have modified the original document from his visual archive, meeting their past selves and creating new images that “sit somewhere between tribute, interrogation, and reconstruction”. Further layering, concealing and modifying the fixed photographic document, Charlie’s loosely painted overlays re-introduce the artist’s hand and continual edits within the works, applying an appraising eye to the image one has presented and continues to present to the world. A copy of a copy, Charlie’s painted marks fight against the spectre of AI generation in photomedia, as do incongruous elements such as uneven lighting affecting collaged figures and irregular surface polishes across the physical works.

The making of history is often made possible through the re-evaluation of a hoarded archive, seen anew with increased awareness and new perspectives. In After Us, the Flood we are presented with two grids of viewing, a traditional salon hang of gilt frames is set in tension with a close hang of works abutted together, evoking contemporary image consumption through suggestions of an Instagram grid or materially, a roll of film. Another echo of Baroque excess, refracted through two lenses. Charlie’s works speak to cyclical movements of hedonism and revolution, where pleasure and rupture are never fully distinct but continually folded into one another. Within this shifting field, the boundaries of pastiche become unstable, less a question of imitation than of cultural absorption and re-use, where historical styles are endlessly recycled into new regimes of taste. In this sense, the works resist resolution: they operate instead as accumulations of image and reference, where excess is not merely an aesthetic condition but a method of historical thinking. What emerges is a space in which vision itself becomes archival— layered, unstable, and perpetually in flux.

- Luce Reeves-Smith