Exhibitions
In ‘The Four Elements’ series, Simon creates novel interpretations of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water by juxtaposing historical worldviews and perspectives with modern realities.
In his artist statement, he reflects on feeling overwhelmed - not only by the extraordinary array of colours and shapes or the dense blending of text and symbolism found in the works of The Sunderland Collection, but by how seamlessly art, science, mathematics, religion, and mythology intersect.
The foundational inspiration for these four pieces came from the allegorical representations of the seasons featured in the detailed borders of double-hemisphere world maps of Henricus Hondius (1633) and Frederick de Wit (circa 1660).
Art critic Matthew Holman introduces the works:
The first painting in the elemental series - Air - sees an airport ground worker in an orange hard hat and ear defenders tend to a sextant, an instrument with a graduated arc of 60° and a sighting mechanism, used for measuring the angular distances between objects and especially for taking altitudes. Two wide-bodied jets sit on the apron in the flat, in the overexposed light of aviation photography, and above them, occupying the upper third of the canvas, a vast planetary body hangs in a graduated sky with the suggestion of astrological forms: scorpion, centaur, crab. Around the worker’s feet, sheep wander with mild indifference.
Lost, they remind me of the rams and ewes in William Holman Hunt’s rustic paradise, ‘Our English Coasts’ (1852), but their depiction as a strayed flock without a pastor is hyper-accelerated here as they are transplanted into an alternative reality where the solaces of bramble and verge have been replaced by the cold logic of concrete and painted yellow lines. Bejer’s use of the sextant was inspired by Robert Dudley’s ‘Dell’Arcano del Mare’ (1647), the volvelle design from which is held in the Oculi Mundi collection, the first sea atlas to cover the entire world, the first compiled by an Englishman, and the first to base its charts on Mercator’s projection.
Dudley’s encyclopaedia was, at its core, a machine for the organisation of global trade routes and maritime capital. The engraver Antonio Francesco Lucini, working in seclusion for 12 years in an obscure Tuscan village, used in excess of 5,000 pounds of copper in the preparation of the work. That copper - its extraction, its smelting, its transportation to a Tuscan studio, its transformation into engraved plates through 12 years of skilled manual labour - is the material base of an object whose purpose was the coordination of further extraction elsewhere: the navigation of ships carrying enslaved people, colonial commodities, plundered resources across the oceans whose mysteries Dudley claimed to have unlocked.
The arcano - the secret - of the sea was always the labour and violence concealed within the circuits of maritime accumulation. The fourth work in this series takes earth as its element, announced by the blazing orange of a Renaissance explorer’s flag bearing a disembodied hand, index finger extended, signalling the forward march of colonial expansion, or more broadly the hubristic thrust of human ambition.
The handsomely muscular, open-shirted youth who flies it does so with the zeal of an Aleksandr Deineka hero, but a committed peredovik he is not: the course leads nowhere. Beneath a sky of delicate clouds, a fur-coated figure - the proud leader of the expedition - holds a globe and gazes toward a flat, featureless horizon, the great age of discovery reframed as a planning consultation. His boat butts against a road bollard striped in black and amber, the kind one might encounter at the threshold of a grey distribution centre on the outskirts of a provincial town.
Along the canvas’ lower edge runs an ornate cartouche, which tends to signal historical gravity or official sanction, but the words are a kitsch poem, its rhymes awkwardly inconsistent, awarding the speaker a “B plus for effort” from a personified Fortune who ‘bitch-slaps’ them into submission.
Bejer’s figures are all in the business of organising the world for movement - for the passage of goods, bodies, and capital - and the painting folds a Renaissance explorer’s swagger into the anachronistic geometry of a modern roundabout, as if the energy that drives men to plant flags and draw maps were continuous with the engineering of traffic flow in a neoliberal economy.
The Earth, in Bejer’s reading, has always been a logistics problem to be overcome, not merely the place from which we orient ourselves in the cosmos. What changes between Dudley’s copper plates and the road bollard, then, appears to be the costume, not the calculus.
Several works in the series rely less on the accumulation of anachronistic imagery - or rather, that accumulation does not undermine the legibility of the scene in the same way. In Air and Earth, the figures and objects cannot be imagined together on the same picture plane, even as they criss-cross through different historical vistas; the structural logic of the scene, of the coherence of depth and togetherness, simply cannot hold.
