A Lover's Discourse:
Issy Wood
& Fernando Botero

The fifth presentation of A Lover’s Discourse features Tasting it all, a new painting by London-based artist Issy Wood (b. 1993, USA) exhibited alongside Fernando Botero’s oil on canvas Lovers from 1982.

A new text by Wood accompanies the display and expands on her long-time interest in the volumetric figuration and stylized characters championed by the renowned Colombian painter, who passed away earlier this year. Wood’s new work shows a larger-than-life can of Diet Coke resting on its side. Lively and seemingly content on its horizontal plane, this stretched object takes up the full canvas and locks our gaze in close. Physical proximity is a recurring spatial motif in Wood’s work: her subjects—whether it be a leather car seat, a self-portrait, an antique ornament, or a pile of recyclable waste—tend to materialize through unnerving close-ups and focused crops derived from more expansive scenes. Experiencing this closeness arouses cravings, repulsions, intrusions, and desires. The emotional scripts within Wood’s paintings recur and mutate, never wearing out.

Surreal, oneiric, and feminist undertones in her paintings and texts connect Wood with a lineage of twentieth century artists including Leonora Carrington and Lee Lozano. Her work is seen here for the first time in conversation with the practice of Fernando Botero, whose polarizing paintings of swollen, exaggerated people and objects have spilled into mainstream circuits in his namesake style “Boterismo.” Committed to figuration and realism, these two artists seem drawn to reality merely as a foundational source material. Interested in the semiotics of Botero’s unabashedly massive bodily forms, Wood chooses to juxtapose Lovers with a depiction of the popular sugar-free drink, perhaps one of America’s most successful attempts at generating—and dealing with—both pleasure and guilt.