Pablo Genovés: Tides St Paul’s Cathedral 2017

Water brings life and death, rebirth and harvest, flooding and drought, as it ebbs and flows across our planet. Fundamental to the rituals of all religions and symbolic of life itself it is a more than fitting theme for St Pauls. Genovés is very much an artist of our anthropocene age where human activity is seen as the dominant influence on climate and the environment, forces which then have a dramatic effect on human life and movement in an increasingly worrying spiral. His work dramatises this uncertain world. Transition and change over time are the broader themes of his large photographic collages, often made with historical imagery, what he calls “rescued pictures”. Genoves melds these found images with his own photographs to create a strange universe hovering outside time, encouraging us to look again. Baroque libraries, churches and palaces are possessed to the point of destruction by elemental forces. Chambers that once echoed with prayer, song and debate are now laid waste to the silent roar of cloud, wind and sea. We are forced to remember Shelley's instruction to “look upon my works ye mighty and despair”.

In this specially commissioned series for St Paul's Genovés works with Wren’s neoclassical masterpiece rather than his signature Baroque, which in previous work has provided a metaphor for decadence and hubris. However the clean lines and harmonious order of musically repeating arches and spheres provide the perfect counterpoint to the cacophony of nature’s chaos as it swells and rises in the familiar interiors. Formal contrasts are drawn between the vertical structured architecture and the amorphous horizontal bodies of water and mist. Two great forces, order and chaos, trapped together on the work’s surface, destined to battle by definition.

All this destruction of culture by nature should be terrifying, and it is, but the beauty of Wren’s extraordinary monument to God’s Glory and human hope, and the dynamism of the theme: great masses of tidal energy, make the images exciting, even uplifting. They rouse us like a great swelling symphonic last movement that is about to end in a series of thunderous chords…. followed by silence.

It is a credit to the enlightened management of Saint Paul's that an artist who deals with such troubling ideas, symbolised by the destruction of the very building that commissioned the work, should be invited to present his work. Humanity abandoned by God to the elemental forces? Perhaps he is waiting in the wings, about to appear Deus ex machina to part the waters and lead us to safety. It is true that Genovés’ work shares the obscure and extravagant imagery of the book of Revelations whose most simple message can be understood as: God will prevail. So maybe the choice is not so strange.