The Basket Of Apples By Helen Marten Analysis

Contemporary art is bound by the pre-eminent waves of modernity. This is to say that most all contemporary artists are to some degree in debt to their modern predecessors. Helen Marten’s sculptural installation Peanuts (2012) relies heavily upon the appropriation of past art movements; particularly the re-interpretation of the still life and Cezanne’s renowned The Basket of Apples (1895).
Throughout Helen Marten's installation there exists a return to materiality and form. Peanuts (2012) aims to highlight basic composition; reducing objects to simplified form and colour. Desks, canned olives, loaves of bread, Charlie Brown cartoons, cheap pizza flyers – all methodically placed around the Chisenhale Gallery space in London. Marten harmonises these reduced elements to create a skeuomorphic representation of everyday objects, branding and iconography . Her twisted ‘still life’ exists in complete fabrication and relies heavily on individual perception. In the current world of retinal impatience, simulacra are everything . The 21st century high speed consumption of images, as a result of technological advance, has made for a paranoiac, schizoid mode of perception. Peanuts (2012) simulates the fragmented way
in which information and images are processed by today’s consumers.
This authorial voice of Helen Marten can be likened to the visual language of Cezanne In The Basket of Apples (1895). Cezanne’s 1985 oil painting is known for its disjointed perspective; a tilted table adorned with pseudo objects, glowing fruits cast in a dense and dynamic play of shadows. Cezanne’s composition speaks foremost to tonality and form. As a French artist at the tail end of Impressionism, Cezanne did not accept the canon of the time; he worked in solidarity and devoted his practice to perception. This beginning from early on in his career, markedly in exhibiting the Salon des Refuse in 1863 .
In his fascination with optics, Cezanne attempted to reduce naturally occurring forms to their geometric essentials. Theorist Erle Loran furthers that Cezanne thought of the factors of space in a more abstract sense, placing heavy importance on the abstraction of drawing and colour modulation. His use of colour achieved both a sense of spatiality and flatness. At the end of the 19th century, following the Franco-Prussian war, The Basket of Apples (1895) was viewed as a primitive interpretation of late impressionism –however Cezanne’s 1895 still life went on to be recognised as the beginnings of both cubism and fauvism . Kuspit continues in claiming that aesthetic perception had and continues to have no patience with the process of perception itself, thus explaining why Cezanne’s simplified approach was so effective .
Cézanne spent a lifetime trying to paint around the skin edge of an apple, but in doing so, also catalogued meticulous interest in weight, form and density .
Helen Marten utilises much the same techniques as Cezanne, aiming to reveal the complexity of digital perception. With the loss of physicality and surface friction in digital media the mind is left confused. In order to navigate out of this confusion, we count on memory and experience. In both the work of Cezanne and Marten it is evident that shifted representation of the everyday re-contextualises the appearance of these objects completely. Cezanne acts as a forefather in the manipulation of optics and perception, it is evident in Marten’s Peanuts (2012) that she works similarly within a contemporary
setting.
Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist asserts that Helen Marten “is making codes…her work is like a contemporary Rosetta stone. It is part of a broader conversation.” This broader conversation in the contemporary art world is indebted to the mastery of the very much modern, Cezanne. Marten recognises the relationship she holds to the 19th century painter and continues to interpret his technique in her own unique art making today.