Justin Mortimer is a British painter who explores the visceral psychological turmoil of humankind. His imagery comes from photographs that he finds online or in books, which he cobbles together in a collage to be used as reference. What he chooses to paint is most often disturbing, the horrifying realism of his subjects pairing with impressionist marks that obscure and fragment their original contexts.

Family Dollar, 2009

My first impression of Mortimer's work was more focused on the physical than the psychological. The strange gravity of viewing corpses, abandoned facilities, and even just nude figures captured with unflattering flash photography isn't too different from the emotional weight of war photojournalism or crime scene photos. The "narratives" in his paintings may be imaginary, but his sources are not, and I find it impossible to discard the idea of their original contexts in favor of his new composition.

To combat this, Mortimer attempts to separate his paintings from their sources by "redaction." "I imagine screen writing is similar; the less you know about the character the more you want to know - my pictures have no voice over." In partially obscuring things or keeping them off frame, he preserves a sense of mystery and anticipation that doesn't explain too much of what's happening.

Tract, 2012

Mortimer also feel there's a universality in his work that relates to more general concepts of fear, conflict, and loss than specific human conflicts: he calls his scenes "paranoid landscapes" and keeps his figures faceless to show their disconnection from their surroundings, ultimately trying to depict a break down of sanity, peace, and rationality.  

"What makes me want to make art in my studio in a dingy part of East London is that story I want to tell about our fears, our anxieties, how afraid we all are, how we’re all going to die. Are we going to go mad? Am I going to lose my job? Is my body going to fail? Will my loved ones not be around for me? There’s sort of an existential anger—not to sound pretentious—but there is an anger I have in me that drives my work."

Jockey Club, 2007

Mortimer's work is depressing, scary, violent, and very real, and I think that's what attracts me to his paintings in an uncomfortable kind of way; I don't like them but I enjoy that they are scary, morbid, and different from what I'm used to seeing. Even if I don't believe there's any intellectual brilliance to his ideas, I can't help their emotional impact.

The artist himself is very aware that this kind of vouyerism is a common interest among his fans; "I do know that if you scratch the surface of us all you'll find a huge appetite for violence, cruelty, for the subversive and the deviant. Our dark, innate impulse for brutalism is a preoccupation that continually feeds my work."

Der Besucher, 2014