Poetic Anachronisms
When I was at art school in France I had a friend whose parents were responsible for a very small provincial museum―the Musée du Parchemin et de l’Enluminure in the Rouillon-Sarthe region. I remember going there with a group of friends and we were all catapulted back 500 years deep into the European Middle Ages. This museum was also a workshop which housed several hundred types of mineral pigments and plant extracts that were used to reproduce medieval scripts. In this extremely labour-intensive process everything was made from scratch― from the sheepskin leather used for the pages of the books to the illuminated gilded script―and visitors could see and touch the anatomy of this bygone artform. It all created the impression of being stuck in a time machine, not unlike how it feels when looking at the work of Roger Mortimer.
Historical disorientation is a defining feature of Mortimer’s work; it invites us on an excursion deep into the recesses of memory. Although the stories evoked are anchored in history, he is not a historian intent on telling the truth or defending any agenda. Whilst floating in the sea of (2000), for example, the viewer is delivered a visual jolt―no, this is not Avignon c.1509, but New Zealand in 1965. The historical disorientation invoked by Mortimer’s paintings confirms their anachronism; they feature an impossible juxtaposition and layering of differing historical eras into one scene or vision.
