Body Swallows World

Aurel Schmidt’s Body Swallows World is partly inspired by Théodore Rousseau’s monumental The Forest in Winter at Sunset (c.1846-67), held in the Met collection in New York, where the artist lives and works. Rousseau’s vast, dark, autumnal painting, with its shadowy intricacies of tree branches and roots, was the template for Schmidt’s investigation of landscape as both external terrain and allegorical projection. Taking its title from Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1940s book Rabelais and his World, in which the author discusses the chaotic carnal celebration of the carnivalesque, Schmidt’s work approaches the revolting with a bucolic eye. Her meticulously rendered scene of dense woodland surrounding a black pond dissolves into seething life on closer inspection. Picked out in queasy greys and greens, the fertile forest floor is in fact a carpet of squirming maggots. What look like tree stumps are huge curls of turd, with attendant flies. Anaconda-sized centipedes festoon the branches. Vast cockroaches, spiders, rats and moths roam the undergrowth, while what we can glimpse of the sky above is filled with bats. Assorted human detritus – a discarded drugs baggie, gnawed chicken bones, teeth, batteries, a tampon, fag ends, bottle caps – mingles with the vermin in this pestilential forest. To the left, a gigantic snake swallows a gigantic frog, the message of worldly vanity underscored by a crumpled dollar bill beneath the struggling amphibian. The artist’s initials eerily appear in the legend ‘RK ♡ AS’ carved into a tree, while other trunks bear faces and sphincters. Infesting Rousseau’s Romantic sylvan vision, Schmidt creates a perverse celebration of all that is vile, a gleeful memento mori of decomposition and decay.