Jeff Walls photography often makes deliberate and open references to past imagery. Often the imagery is from the Canon of Western history painting. This is the case here, with the nod being towards Delacroix’s ‘The Death of Sardanapalus’.

Wall does not borrow the specfics of the subject matter. Instead he takes something at its core, and then also pulls on the formal advances of the images.

Delacroix’s sub ject is of a meglomanic king, determined to outlive all his possesions. Aware of his impending death he orders all his possesions, horses and wives included, to be destroyed. The manic and uncontrolled violence is told through the deep reds which pervade the whole image, the violence and pace of the brushwork and the web of curving lines which mount up the picture plane. The whole image seems to have been tiled up, as if collapsing and pouring down across the surface.

Wall tells a parallel story but set in a contemporary, real and domestic setting.  It seems to be a story of domestic tensions having exploded in a fit of rage. We are left with the aftermath, once the cast (presumably of two) have left the stage. It is like the scene of a crime.

The red stays, filling the image with that sense of violent passion and lose of control. There is a strnage balance between chaos and stillness. The nature of photography and the abscence of any action or figures gives a sesne of increadible stillness. yet the chaotic spread of colour and objects creates a pattern of energy, as if remembering the recent past.

Wall sits comfortably and intellignetly on the boundary of painting and photography. He is a photographer in that he takes photographs, recording real visions. Yet he fits closely to a tradition of image making more traditiaonlly assocaited with painting. For the vision is constructed, it is composed, it is a synthetic ordering of parts. In this sense it has the theatricality and artificiality of painting.