ANTIC HAY
Cicek Gallery is pleased to present Antic Hay, the first UK solo exhibition of Maltese artist and political cartoonist Sebastian Tanti Burlò. This timely show is a critique on the decadence of Western society, capturing its decline through 14 new oil paintings.
Cicek Gallery is pleased to present Antic Hay, the first UK solo exhibition of Maltese artist and political cartoonist Sebastian Tanti Burlò. The timely show surveys the ever-declining decadence of Western societies, and levels an irreverent critique at the nationalistic sentiments sweeping the European continent.
Antic Hay comprises a new collection of 14 oil paintings that includes a ribald cast of fictional caricatures – ranging from Major Mann to the artist’s signature “Sausage People” – set amid a series of stately and mundane surroundings. As the political cartoonist for the Times of Malta, Burlò’s honed satirical commentary underpins the whole of Antic Hay.
The artist repurposes the public fixation on luxurious narratives of nobility and power, seen across popular culture from Downton Abbey to Succession. He evokes the current state of Western democracy, a haggard society filled with a creeping sense of anti-establishment revolution.
In his series Decay and Decadence in Late Britain, Burlò has created a triptych of theatrical and stately – if somewhat rundown – interiors, adorned with trophies of endangered animals. Unwittingly mirroring the plight of these hunted beasts, in the first of the series we find Major Mann alone, dwarfed by his emptied home, his old portrait in full military dress the only painting left in his collection. He is sitting reading a newspaper headlined “Last Polar Bear Dies” as his bare feet caress its worn white pelt.
In contrast to Decay and Decadence of Late Britain, three rich canvases capture life in the heat of the Mediterranean. Breakfast in Pisciotta, Aperitivo in Mezzomonte and Dusk in Palermo brim with trappings of luxury and are saturated with the yellows and greens that signify the region’s vitality. However, the trio are cut with warnings that these islands of privilege cannot remain so for much longer. A vanitas skull lurks behind our smoking protagonist in Mezzomonte; the morning’s newspaper in Pisciotta is headlined “We’re Fucked”; and a copy of Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa lies on the coffee table in Palermo. The sky is stained orange by returning summer fires.
Burlò took much inspiration for this series from Il Gattopardo; a tale of the old order in decline with incontrovertible change in the air, encapsulated in the paradox “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same”. Despite the verdant surroundings of these scenes, the artist directs our attention beyond their carefree façades towards a deeper political miasma.
Throughout the exhibition, Burlò’s “Sausage People” are seen going about their everyday life. According to the artist, “They hold up a mirror to us. We recognise our blind overconsumption of resources…” It is a scathing visual remark on the comfortable laurels we sit upon.
The various worlds collide in Midnight in Paris, in which a richly dressed man gazes languidly at the viewer, unperturbed by the Molotov cocktail that has smashed through the restaurant window. This signals a flashpoint moment within Antic Hay that sees the tense boundaries between the haves and the have- nots beginning to violently erode.
The name Antic Hay references an absurd dance described in Christopher Marlow’s Edward II, as well as Aldous Huxley’s novel of the same name that explores the decline of an aimless societal elite post-WWI.
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