24 November 2023 – 27 January 2024

16, rue du Simplon, 1207 Geneva, Switzerland ↗

Sébastien Bertrand is pleased to present Lady Into Fox, Natalia González Martín’s second solo show at the gallery.

The fox is a liminal creature. Throughout history, it has adapted fluidly to wild forests, cultivated farmland and dense cities, thriving alongside humans and finding its place at night.

It is the archetype of the fox that Natalia González Martín interrogates in her latest body of works, a series of twenty paintings on wood. Drawing its title from David Garnett’s eponymous 1922 novella, the show riffs upon the book’s narrative of a man whose new bride, Sylvia, unexpectedly transforms into a fox. Garnett’s text opens with Sylvia retaining her human consciousness: she is ashamed of her nudity and fearful of the outside world. However, as winter approaches, she yields to an increasing wilderness. Sylvia escapes the home. She catches prey and grinds its bones between her teeth. She breeds and births a litter of kits.

Lady Into Fox, strange and rich in symbols, opens up a generous space in which González Martín can reapproach and rework ideas she has previously explored – metamorphosis, spirituality, religion and the feminine – as well as confront new themes: human-animal relations, societal conventions, and primal instincts.

But where is the fox in González Martín’s paintings?

There is a rabbit, plump and white against a Prussian blue sky. There is the conical head of a long-haired dog gazing upwards, inquisitive and searching. There are muscular, glistening horse rumps. But the fox is never quite present, appearing only as an allusion whilst supporting characters – animals from the hunt and prey – take centre stage.

In Can it Be She?, the fox is implicated twice. She skulks in the distance, eyes fire bright and rests on the chest of a female nude, recast as a golden pendant. In Monsters of All Sorts, she re-enters as a brown, long, luxurious fur coat. The imagery implies one of the central concerns in both Garnett’s text and González Martín’s exhibition: transformation and the conclusive metamorphosis, death.

There’s a turning point in Lady into Fox when Sylvia abandons her human clothes, signifying her definitive crossing of the threshold into the animal world. In this body of paintings, too, Gonzalez Martin’s nude emerges more eminently; the modest hand which may have previously lingered over a crotch has disappeared, affording us – in its absence – an unguarded, potentially affronting view of fleshy, pink vulva and sparse, tenderly rendered pubic hairs.

Hair, in fact, is recurrent in this body of work. On animal bodies, both alive and dead, their fur surging with subtle tone shifts. On human bodies, glossy, seductive, and falling against colourful jewels.

It occupies the entire frame in both Extraordinary Devotion and Extraordinary Devotion (variant). Hair is here used as a symbol of beauty, sensuality, the feminine, the untamed and the animal.

Vixen, foxy. So much within the English language ties the fox to the female and to sex.  The linguistic link between these terminologies and the archetypical “sly fox” label serves as a rather obvious iteration of female sexuality as nothing more than an act of manipulation, a trick. González Martín’s women, too, are guilty of suitably alluring forms of trickery, her figures recalling the deftly rendered nudes of the Renaissance, their flesh luminous, round and alive. 

González Martín doesn’t often paint men. But this time, the masculine does appear, albeit hidden—much like the fox—in metaphor. He’s present in a dewy, phallic plant that reaches towards the night sky. He’s present in the dog, as gentle as it may seem. He’s present in the tightly constructed crops of the tensile rears of stallions, an animal evocative of virility, status, sexuality, and the warrior. In the placement of these images—the hunting animals, in particular—alongside sorrowful, passive female faces, one can find allusions to the brutal conclusion of Garnett’s text, as well as a wider context of gendered power dynamics.

González Martín decides to structure her world at night. Where once there were wafts of white cumulus, now dark velvet backdrops hang, slithers of moon, flecked stars. This further speaks to the archetypal notions of the feminine: Greek mythology casts the night as a shadowy goddess, Nix, and the moon has been universally associated with the female. The shift in time heightens these works’ oneiric associations and offers a more plausible landscape for strange happenings and transformations.

Gonzalez Martin has spoken about how German Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder proved a particularly vital influence for this new body of work, his odd, milky bodies so graciously composed against dark backgrounds. In fact, she is constantly borrowing from art history, reworking motifs and sampling sections from historical paintings. The cerulean blue forget-me-nots that spring from her grass are pilfered from Raphael’s work, the crawling insects in This Spell of Fine Weather lifted from the vanitas of the Dutch Golden Age.

Images of religious and spiritual significance recur: thin, red scars on shins and swarming blood droplets gathered at knees reference the stigmata (bodily wounds which appear in locations corresponding to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ). There are fruits of temptation—the wet, red apple—and there are succulent grapes which hold manifold symbolism: the wine of the eucharist and Christ’s blood; mythology, pleasure and Dionysus; and with the fox, as its favourite fruit (Aesop’s The Fox and the Grapes). 

There is a point in Lady into Fox when Sylvia, in fox form, and her husband, Richard – so drunk he finds himself “down on all fours”, “a beast too like his wife” -  are suggested to have sex with one another. The act drives the husband to melancholia, a man who can’t do anything but repent to God. The relationship between sex and God is an established trope, and when these two entities meet in Garnett’s text – as so often in other contexts – shame is also present.

Yet, in Natalia Gonzalez Martin’s paintings, the synergy between these two is allowed to exist clean-handed. As boundaries slip, lust and spirituality are embedded in the same image, and desire exists clean-handed. As boundaries slip, lust and spirituality are embedded in the same image, and desire exists concurrently across multiple spheres. Like the fox, desire becomes the trickster: a shapeshifter, roaming freely, seducing us, and always just out of reach.

— Text by Sophie Ruigrok, (read the full version here)