I'm exploring in paint the issues of abuse of power, control, image production, information, mercury and mythology. I am concerned with the abuses of the medical establishment and the government. The misuse of mercury, the element, began at the end of the 15th century. Its misuse continues to this day and is closely linked to the rise of Autism, although hotly debated. The paintings seek to address images created to further an agenda, used by those in power. The paintings are flawed or broken to show both seen and unseen. Architecture is intended to evoke power as a symbol, a place where everyday decisions have the potential to inflict terror on society. With a range of stylistic approaches and methodologies I'm examining the nature of investigation, via painting, in relation to art history, as a reflection of the myriad journeys of the Mind.

— Susan Lizotte

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Susan Lizotte: Blood & Treasure
Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles 2015

In her latest body of work, the curious and expansive series Mercury, painter Susan Lizotte both mines and mimics history to construct a poignant and eccentric allegory for the present day. She marries a haute-naif aesthetic of thick lines, blocky color, proto-Cubist mannerism, and collapsed perspective with a visual lexicon of knights errants and dogged explorers, sea monsters and tall ships, architectural ruins and sketchy outlines of uncharted territories. All of which serves to reconstruct an alternative narrative of the New World and certain rather salacious and cynical, yet consistently under-reported, consequences of its “discovery” for the Old World -- and how those forces and effects continue to shape the world today. Ultimately an indictment of power and its abuses, Mercury traces the roots of medical, industrial, environmental, and commercial misbehavior that have been shaping life on earth for 500 years and counting. And it uses art history to do it.

In both style and content, Lizotte’s modern medievalism prefigures a new dark age, as the 16th century dawns anew at the start of the 21st. Her striking, emotional rendering of both figure and ground wavers between her premise’s representational imperatives and a gravitational pull toward abstraction that fittingly has more in common with pre-Raphaelite awkwardness than contemporary gestural expression. Her tertiary palette also seems culled from another era, one of parchment and velvet, sea foam and starry skies. Although Lizotte engages this art historical motif to depict geopolitical events from the same era her pointed content references, this gestalt is punctuated by compositional incursions large and small in the form of splashes of neon color, faintly pulsing grids in a dusky sky, and outright anachronisms like spray paint and text that slam into the present day at crucial moments, injecting both chemical clarity and disorienting ambiguity into the conversation.  

Mercury in ancient mythology was the messenger god, conduit to the underworld, patron of thieves and commerce. It is also a metallic element that is beautiful and poisonous, widely used in early modern medicine, until its nefarious properties were observed. After that it was still used -- just mostly on the unsuspecting. In Lizotte’s project, she focuses on its use in Europe after 1500, specifically to treat the particularly virulent strain of syphilis that Columbus and those who came after him managed to bring back to Europe along with their treasure and appetite for glory. This story of karma, irony, disease, greed, racism, fear, technology, and government overreach took place in an age where magic still held sway but humans were increasingly looking to science for answers. In regarding this particular chapter of ancient history, Lizotte cannot help but see the world around her now. Far East, Near East, Middle East. Colonialism, conquest, hubris. Church, state, commerce. Environment, industry, religion. Mercury is a story that continues to unfold across centuries of Western history, its players perennially locked in an intercontinental Game of Thrones complete with kings, pawns, dragons, sex, death, and pirate gold.