Song of the Whale

"By using the landscape format, every painting becomes its own little world, a pictorial adventure, a static voyage through a mental landscape". Sorry We're Closed, Press release, 2023.

With Song of the Whale, Julien Meert returns to horizontal painting, after ten years of exploring the vertical plane. Against an orange-pink background, and under flurries of snow, two figures embrace each other. In the top right corner, a peeping tom watches them jealously. The scene is at once tender and unsettling. For the figures, Meert was inspired by the expressionist painter Gustave De Smet. The lower half of the painting is dominated by a phallic shape, or is it the tail of a whale? The male heads on either side take inspiration from sculptures by artist Nancy Grossman, evoking the artist's complex relationship with masculinity. In the top left corner, we see the playful silhouette of a cat, a counter-motif to all the unease on show.

The painting was premiered in the Planétarium exhibition at Sorry We're Closed in 2023, where Meert showcased horizontal instead of vertical works for the very first time. During the creation of this work, he frequently listened to Song of the Whale, a meditative synth track from 1981 composed by Texan musician J.D. Emmanuel.