Art - Ned Denny on a delicate ballet of dismemberment and fatality

In her remarkable recent pieces, the American artist Inka Essenhigh has achieved a kind of cartoon surrealism, producing the sort of images that DalI or Bacon might have come up with had they been trained as animators. Granted, Essenhigh's works are paintings, too, but they look more like stills from some weirdly necrophiliac Disney feature or an animated version of Ovid's Metamorphoses. All the chief characteristics of the cartoon are there - the areas of clear, unearthly colour, the sharply outlined forms, the total absence of visible brushstrokes. But that is where the resemblance to conventional animation ends, because what Essenhigh does is to take the cheery deathlessness of the cartoon world and blow it apart.

Everything in these paintings is on the verge of becoming something else, of spurting off in ten directions at once like a milk droplet hitting a table. The bright colours and clean outlines lead you to expect clear, intelligible objects, and yet those "objects" seem bent on twisting themselves into mad arabesques that make no sense whatsoever. A horse appears in the agonised throes of transformation into a huge, airborne trainer while a small winged boot flutters nearby (Pegasus, 2001). Pale, ghostly fleeces swirl like cigarette smoke out of Petri dishes (Manmade Garden, 2001). All is writhing, wind-licked, plucked at by unseen forces. Bone warps into ectoplasmic cloud, scalps sprout tendrils and skin peels back like leather to reveal the perfect architecture of a ribcage.

Yet the funny thing is that there's nothing in the least bit gory about these works. On the contrary, the splayed-out viscera of Essenhigh's paintings impress you above all with their cleanliness and elegance. More art nouveau than splatterfest, they make dismemberment seem like the most delicate of ballets. This is the source of her work's strangeness - that she is using cartoons to express something that might be thought of as anathema to them, namely death and consumption. And death is, after all, what these paintings are about. Clock this and all those extravagantly dissected bodies, all those empty-eyed animal hides, start to fall into place. The inky night that they appear against comes to seem not so much the outer darkness of space as the inner darkness of earth. Down there, Essenhigh's paintings would have us believe, the most spectacular transformations occur. Even so, she does not try to convince us that death is particularly pleasant.

For a cuter but somehow scarier conflation of cartoons and fatality, you're going to have to trek from Victoria Miro, where Essenhigh is showing, to Takashi Murakami's exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. If the spectacle of post-pubescent Japanese girls worshipping at the shrine of Hello Kitty strikes you as odd, then this show (the artist is male and turns 40 this year) is going to seem very strange indeed.

Murakami's world is one of big, dinky eyes that float like spawn in a pinkish jelly (the whole of the first room is wallpapered with this design, leading you to search in vain for a cot in the corner). It's a world of pseudo-trippy mushrooms that gaze at you coyly through heavy- lidded eyes. It's a world of maniacally laughing flowers, each one sticker-perfect and with the exact same expression of vapid, wipe-clean glee. It is, in short, somewhere that only babies, acid casualties and the aforementioned Hello Kitty fans could possibly feel at home. For anyone else, it's a cut-price lobotomy and more than a little unsettling.

But maybe that's the point. Just as too much sugar will poison you in the end, so prolonged immersion in this Play School version of Arcadia makes your mind hurt. There's a fine line between cute and creepy, and after a while those chortling flowers start to veer disturbingly towards the latter. And, when given more than a cursory glance, the perpetual summer that they inhabit comes to seem preposterous and empty, its cheerfulness the madly forced cheerfulness of the neurotic.

Am I taking all this far too seriously? Not necessarily, because there are signs that Murakami knows full well that the Japanese cult of kawaii, or "cuteness", is not entirely benign, that it's a people-eater. That's the significance, I assume, of the skulls which crop up in the sculptures, and of those black-fanged blobs (the evil incarnation of his Mr Dob character) that gnash their way through some of the paintings. Could it be, in fact, that he's trying to make the world of kawaii altogether less comfortable? I'd like to think so.

"Inka Essenhigh" is at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London N1 (020 7336 8109), until 7 December; "Takashi Murakami: kaikai kiki" is at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2 (020 7402 6075), until 26 January 2003

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website