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EXHIBITION - THE PERFECT LIFE Rebecca Scott’s latest work, her Perfect Life series, reflects the stage at which she finds herself as a woman, a painter, a mother and a consumer. Her work has always been at once personal and a commentary on society. Like most of us she is divided: both consumer and critic of all she surveys. As ever she is drawn to the idea of desire and to the very human urge to strive for perfection and forever fail to grasp it – an urge which the commercial world exploits mercilessly. Here she turns her attention to the way in which the functional, everyday, domestic, anodyne objects found in lifestyle magazines and catalogues – glasses, crockery, bed linen – promise perfection and the satisfaction of desire to those who buy them. The more she paints these pictures; the emptier they become. And the more imperfect. Despite the fact that she uses catalogues for inspiration, Scott’s technique is such that previously crystal clear images attain a little roughness. The more she paints, the more her brushstrokes render her subjects imprecise, abstract even – and all the better for it if popular opinion is anything to go by. Although we think we like our images glossy and perfect, we respond more warmly to subjects that are unique, flawed. Perhaps they remind us of ourselves. The Perfect Life exhibition runs from 26th May to 24th June 2006 at S t a n d p o i n t G a l l e r y 45 Coronet Street London N1 6HD All images are © Rebecca Scott and not for reproduction without permission. Before this, Scott was best known for her male nudes, painted in reaction to a culture which bombards us with images of naked females but which has not yet taught us to gaze on the male in the same way. In 1988, in a delicious irony, one of her male nudes made the front page of the Sun. It was newsworthy because senior staff at Goldsmiths’ deemed it too shocking for the eyes of a visiting Princess Anne – this from the very newspaper, of course, which serves up images of the bodies of page-3 girls on a daily basis The present work, The Perfect Life series, is wilfully unfashionable. There was a time when art provided an escape from the great looming world of commerce. It sometimes even criticized the hidden agendas of multi-national corporations. It transcended. Now among Scott’s contemporaries at Goldsmiths’, the vogue appears to be for large-scale public art which is either sponsored by big business – think Unilever’s sun in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall – or in cahoots with it in some other way – Damien Hirst’s now defunct Pharmacy Restaurant. What could be less cool, then, than a painting of a white plate: lowly, bourgeois, domestic, everyday, private? When millions are being paid for ‘shocking’ work featuring sharks, shit and used condoms, perhaps the only way left for us to express that we are tired of being shouted at is by whispering.