Angela Vettese on Isaac Julien's latest work
Italian art critic and scholar Angela Vettese published a text on Isaac Julien's latest work All That Changes You. Metamorphosis in the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.
The text titled Julien's Labyrinth reflected in Romano (Il labirinto di Julien si specchia in Romano) praises the work saying that "one finds the elegance that has always distinguished [Julien's] films, as if a certain degree of beauty or poetry were important in order to engage the viewer" and calls the installation "a Wunderkammer and a discourse on the kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria which creates life".
The English translation is below:
JULIEN’S LABYRINTH REFECTS ITSELF IN GIULIO ROMANO
By Angela Vettese
At the Fruttiere of Palazzo Te, the British artist creates a path of mirrors and screens which interacts with the Sala dei Giganti (The Hall of the Giants) by the Renaissance artist Giulio Romano on the theme of Metamorphoses”.
No work by Isaac Julien (London 1960) has ever been so complex and sophisticated: full of askew perspectives and reiterated images, it creates a labyrinthine path between a number of mirrors on the walls and ten screens projecting the same film at asynchronous timings. We are in Mantua in the Fruttiere of Palazzo Te, restored after the damages caused by the 2012 earthquake. The exhibition, a world premiere which will tour the world’s most prestigious museums, was conceived by the director of Palazzo Te, Stefano Baia Curioni, and curated by Lorenzo Giusti.
It is part of the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the sumptuous palace commissioned by the Gonzaga family, and it would be fitting to view it after a visit to the Hall of the Giants, painted in 1535 by Giulio Romano, who was also the architect of the palace: monstrously muscular bodies breaking columns, scantily clad women, clouds and vivid colours stand out against a perspective which is no longer as serene as Raphael’s, though the latter had been Romano’s master. ‘Anybody who enters that room cannot help but fear that everything will collapse on top of them,’ Giorgio Vasari wrote. And indeed, Romano’s masterpiece represents the turbulence of a world in turmoil, as Italy was in the 16th century and as the whole world is today, when we are scared of the deadly changes which are looming over us.
It is no coincidence that Julien’s work is entitled All That Changes You. Metamorphosies. The script has been written by several people, especially under the watchful eye of Mark Nash, curator of Documenta11 in 2002, director of several art schools and Julien’s husband. Julien – ranked 22nd in terms of influence in the art world according to Art Review, knighted in 2022, recipient of various other awards for his commitment to black and gay culture, fresh from a solo exhibition at Tate Modern (2023) which was a consecration – started by capturing the main feature of that hall: the fact that every inch of its walls is covered by paintings and therefore it constitutes a sort of multisensory device which captivates the viewer. A second element the two rooms have in common is a reinterpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses however elliptical and hard to read it may be. A third similarity lies in the almost blinding brilliance of the colours and reflections of light produced by the projections, which can be seen on both the front and the rear surface of the screens. In the second case the screens reflect also the silhouettes of the spectators, maximizing their physical involvement. These parallelisms are tributes by a contemporary artist to two authors from two great movements of our art history, late Renaissance for Giulio Romano and Latin culture for Ovid. This is a splendid way to celebrate and activate our heritage and constitutes an example to be repeated also elsewhere with the same sophistication.
Quite obviously Julien’s strong relationship with Giulio Romano does not make him lose his aesthetical autonomy, nor his ideological engagement. First of all, we find here the same elegance that has always distinguished all his films, as if a certain degree of beauty or poetry were important to captivate viewers. Then there is the question of montage: here everybody composes one’s own film combining the visual tracks provided by the ten screens and the mirrors that reflect them. This suggests that no narrative is ever definitive, that we inhabit a universe of doubt and that the notions we consider unchangeable are instead part of a constantly changing flow.
As he did on other occasions – for example for the film dedicated to Derek Jarman, starring Tilda Swinton – Julien shows a great ability to attract prominent actors. Here we find Shakespearian actress Sheila Atim and Game of Thrones star Gwendoline Christie who embody celestial deities travelling through an intergalactic world. Reclining upon modern sofas as if on triclinia, the two goddesses consult luminescent books and discuss the fate of species and humankind.
The dialogue is interspersed with fantastic architectural and natural sights: there is the Hall of the Giants, of course; the Cosmic House by landscape architect and postmodern theorist Charles Jencks; we recognize the Californian garden of Walt Disney’s granddaughter, which houses a replica of the Apollo IX spacecraft capsule; we see the lush Californian forests and seabeds populated by yellow, orange and purple seahorses and giant fluorescent jellyfish; white greyhounds, horses and other wonders: the installation is also a Wunderkammer and a discourse on the kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria that life is, if we look at it without retreating into our egos.
The film is, in fact, a tribute to existence and to what we are probably in the process of losing: the metamorphosis we are facing is not only a sociopolitical one, though Julien always keeps part of his attention to the socially neglected and to old and modern slavery. The change which looms over us concerns above all the health of nature in both a spiritual and a purely physical sense. This is expressed in clear but also very evocative terms by the most famous theorist of the “infected planet”: the first few minutes of the film are taken up by the face and voice of Donna Haraway, the feminist biologist who has extended her reflections on the marginalization of women to the humiliating disregard for the planet. Haraway is emeritus professor at Santa Cruz, the same Californian university where Julien teaches. She is also the scholar who has been able to convey most clearly the certainty of the danger humanity is facing, proposing some possible actions to try and avoid it: not to have babies, but form inter-species families; not to underestimate the role of biodiversity and the interdependence of living beings. In this context, humans and their products, all along history, have been part of a whole, of a holistic Spinozian cosmos that we hope to be able to save. And this attempt at global safety also includes our cultural and creative heritage whose richness constitute a very important escape route from catastrophe.
