It’s strange what desire will make foolish people do, as a great poet once said (Chris Isaak in sultry ’90s megahit ‘Wicked Game’). And it’s making everyone froth at the mouth, crawl on all fours and stuff their faces with cake in this brilliant, erotic, randy duo show by young painters Lydia Pettit and Time Out fave Olivia Sterling.
Food and physicality are intimately linked in Sterling’s work. Here, hands grasp at cakes, Jammie Dodgers are squished into bosoms, strings of sausages are rendered as flaying, floppy phalluses. Her paintings are bawdy, naughty, funny seaside romps, all primary coloured and confrontational. A dog sniffs at crotches, bright pink legs have crashed through a ceiling. This is art about wanting, but feeling like you shouldn’t. To desire is to consume (whether a lover or a fondant fancy), and to consume is to give in. Sterling seems to view both food and sensuality as treats laced with guilt.
Pettit’s work is darker. These self-portraits find her crazed, manic, rabid. She froths at the mouth, her eyes are demonic red, she paces like a dog. Everything is lost in shadows and menacing crimson, like these are visions of a secret self she can’t let out.
But the thing is, you can’t keep desire in, it finds a way, and here the subconscious is exploding into reality. It’s funny, scary and also brilliant painting.
Two sculptural works , one by Pettit the other by both of them, are a clash of horror aesthetics and boudoir bants: a body comes crawling terrifyingly out of a locked cellar, a gloved hand teases a dog with sausages.
Together, Pettit and Sterling have made a show about not allowing desire to be hamstrung by shame, about letting your inner horndog hump at the leg of real world, about how the erotic is OK, even if it really does make foolish people do strange things.