The Rise of Split-Screen Painting

Lydia Blakeley pulls imagery from offices. Bex Massey likes to include food. Bobbi Essers splices the body. Each of these artists has recently exhibited paintings containing split-screen images, often crisp figurative scenes abutting depictions of something inanimate or seemingly unassociated. Such painters metabolize our diet of endless images by carefully combining disparate pictures in sequences, in the vein of Robert Longo’s ‘Combines’ series (1981–89), refreshing an approach that spans from renaissance narrative painting to meme culture.

Massey’s oil painting Cryobank Greg (2024), for example, is split into two halves. On the top panel, we see a closely-cropped view of a pair of hands opening a can and spraying forth a fizzy drink, perhaps the foam of a beer. Directly below, the crumpled sheets of a spent bed in the morning light. The painting explores selfhood and the body, suggesting a sexual tension reverberating between one image and the other. In the canvas Daniel (2024), the open mouth of a cat, teeth-bared, mirrors the opening of a pink conch shell, alluding to bodily orifices and animalistic impulses. Massey juxtaposes moments of calm (the shell) with aggression (the cat), and energy (the can) with rest (the bed).

Blakeley’s oil and pencil on linen work Motorola/Rolodex (2024) addresses a different subject matter in a similar way: a pair of hands clutching four 1980s mobile phones to the owner’s chest appears in dialogue with a series of Rolodexes on a wooden desk. It is an image of both dynamism and anachronism, a gleaming future and a stale past. Forward Fold (2024), an oil and pencil work in the same series, depicts a female office worker bent over so her knuckles rest on the floor in its central, vertical frame. In separate frames on either side, two limp potted plants. It’s a knowing evocation of life in the office – one human and two florae, all trapped and wilting.

We are now in another new era, one that is post-internet and post-cinematic.

We don’t lose ourselves in the human figures; we find meaning in the gaps left by the peeling of masking tape and the blurring of pigment where the frames meet. In their proximity, these converging scenes open space for interpretation. Blakeley’s forlorn plants, for instance, accentuate the worker’s depleted emotional state. We construct narratives from these combinations as they merge into a single, interconnected story.

Essers’s composite and layered oil on-canvas scenes of anonymous youthful abandon, angst and friendship is based on candid photographs of her closest inner circle. Their faceless bodies are the main characters in their own stories, hinted at in titles such as The World at Our Command and No One to Tell Us No (both 2024). Despite the obscured faces, the scenes twist a nostalgic and emotional knot. Essers’s characters are making their way in the world, exploring the links between each other in compositions that highlight moments of touch and intimacy, prompting us to relate them to our own lives and adolescent baggage.

Philosopher Andrew Benjamin has argued that the technologies of proximity – the dual slide projector and photographic reproduction – turned art history upon its head. We are now in another new era, one that is post-internet and post-cinematic: artists draw from a rich history of image-making forms – from montage filmmaking to micro-storytelling memes – creating works that are consumed by an informed audience in a society saturated with communication. 

Blakeley, Massey and Essers’ painted frames – often derived from photography – encourage audiences to read multiple images together. They both represent the chaotic experience of time, and hint at the tool with which humans have learnt to make sense of it. In his landmark work Time and Narrative (1983), French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote that ‘time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode.’ In their ordinary and relatable scenes, Blakeley, Essers and Massey meld together different moments and sensations, inviting us to shape narratives from them which we connect to our own experiences. 

The juxtaposition is sometimes tender, sometimes brusque, as our lives are. Conflicting news cycles and even point-and-shoot pictures of our closest friends require us to patch together fragmented moments. In an increasingly confusing and fragmented image world, we need new storytellers to comprehend it – if not artists, who else?

^{Main image: Lydia Blakeley, Forward Fold, 2024, oil and pencil on linen, 1.6 × 2 m. Courtesy: the artist and Niru Ratnam, London; photograph: Studio Damian Griffiths}