Insects have always played a prominent part in the imagination of horror, perhaps because these creatures are the most resistant to being humanized, to taking on characteristics which would make them seem friendly. Their habits are irreducibly disquieting; their life world is necessarily cruel. In our recognition of that, nature becomes a nightmare. Nothing has to be invented. A simple shift in scope and scale will do—we need only to look down to the life below our feet. Alexis Rockman’s recent oil paintings offer compelling glimpses into that world; the grass crawls with insects, blind worms turn through the loam, and clearings in the forest show carcasses of animals that have fallen and rotted. They are landscapes of the grotesque, of that which makes us shudder.
The creatures are remarkably rendered, with a kind of loving attention to each mandible and antenna, hard carapace and blank eye. Rockman is a naturalist of sorts, almost an Audubon of decay, but these are not mere taxonomic studies. The paintings are structured as careful, almost delicate tableaux, with stylized backgrounds lit in deep night-blues, greens, and yellows that isolate the scenes, giving them a gothic beauty. In many of the works, more familiar wildlife is present but victimized, dead, and serving only as flesh and food: a hairy tarantula sits on top of a dead robin, a butterfly is covered with hundreds of ants (they outline the shape of its wings), or a plant grows on a dead mouse. In the Dead of the Night (all works, 1989) shows a dead deer with a huge hole in its crotch; it lies curled on a dark forest floor, with flowers growing up through it. Dangerous Liaisons shows the stem of a flower split open so that we can see a bug inside, living in horrific symbiosis with the plant.
Yet in the midst of decay there is extraordinary life. For every carcass there are a thousand creatures which live around it and consume it; one aspect of this esthetic is that it feeds on surplus. The sheer multitude and omnipresence of unfamiliar forms disturb, and here Rockman’s imagination, eye for detail, and patience serve him well; the composition becomes as much a matter of the number, variety, and specificity of the bugs as of any event. In some of the works there are huge numbers and varieties of spiders, beetles, snakes, ants, and worms, some of them apparently wholly fantastic, and a few with nearly human faces, which adds to our discomfort. The insects are shown crawling, working their jaws, engaged in a kind of li fe in death. This is a side of nature we rarely see, a world very distant and different from our own, though it is as close as our own gardens. It is about both death and dilapidation, and life and its flourishing. Rockman’s stylish presentation of it has a very strange and uneasy quality.
—James Lewis
