FRIEZE SEOUL - SOLO BOOTH
4 - 6 September 2025 (VIP preview 3 September)
What does Narcissus want from the pool? Desire, fulfilment, happiness — or something darker? In Yulia Iosilzon’s new installation, all these possibilities reverberate across a series of suspended paintings in which the mythological anti-hero flickers as though glimpsed on the water’s surface. The pond is rendered in ceramic, is granted a three dimensionality and solidity, a nod to precisely what torments Narcissus, the insubstantiality of his reflection, his inability to touch or hold what transfixes him.
Iosilzon’s installation actively remakes myth to fit the preoccupations of her time while remaining faithful to the guiding themes of the Ancient Greek source material. In Ovid’s telling, Narcissus is desired by many for his beauty, but his pride and self-involvement mean he never reciprocates. When his rejection causes the nymph Echo to languish — and eventually perish — her companions want revenge. They ask the gods to have Narcissus finally fall in love, but without the possibility of obtaining his desire. Their wish is granted. The radiant fluidity in Iosilzon’s paintings, the sinuous curves and dots that might be oceanic flora and fauna, resonate with the ‘clear, unmuddied pool of silvery, shimmering water’ that becomes the object of Narcissus’s attention. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection and obsesses over ‘an empty hope/a shadow mistaken for substance,’ as Ovid phrases it. He stares into the pool day and night, nothing can drag him away — he neither eats nor sleeps — haunted by the impossibility of his desires. Echo, who can only repeat the ends of sentence, subject to her own curse, is similarly afflicted with hopeless longing.
The myth is best known as a parable about vanity, but it’s also a tragedy alive with the ordinary frustration, suffering and shame that comes with loving and desiring others. Iosilzon retains this intensity of feeling but manipulates the myth into something more curious and expansive. Each painting captures a moment, and seen side by side in sequence, Iosilzon bends and compresses time so as to visualise the long period of gazing that results in Narcissus’s demise. And yet, her Narcissus smiles winsomely. He floats in the colourful substance amongst all its swirling forms like he has finally found a home. Iosilzon’s interpretation of the myth is less about need and lack, and more about the freedom to be, in Ovid’s words, ‘a reflection/consisting of nothing’. Iosilzon is intent upon extracting a liberatory message from the title of the collection in which the Narcissus myth is found: Metamorphoses. When a reflection blurs, the figure it depicts vanishes, as Narcissus discovers (to his horror) in Ovid’s tale. But Iosilzon’s paintings imagine each disappearance or interruption as a becoming, a transformation. Narcissus devotes himself to ‘a fleeting phantom’, but rather than focus as Ovid did on the redundancy of this desire, Iosilzon dwells with the playfulness made possible by illusion. She invites us into a wall of mirrors; inevitably, we see ourselves. Who would you become if rebirth was so simple?
Iosilzon’s installation places her within a lineage of artists interested in remaking Ovid’s myth. Perhaps most famously, Caravaggio, who painted Narcissus at the end of the sixteenth century. He shows a young man meeting his reflection, his fleshly hand converging with its image in the water as he reaches into the pool. Countless other examples from across European art depict this same encounter between Narcissus and his image. Each in some way returns to the awe, absorption, and arrested time of Caravaggio’s painting. Iosilzon’s Narcissus shares the central motif, but subtly alters its perspective Through the arrangement of the paintings and the sculpture, Narcissus looks outwards towards the viewer as he looks into the pool. A space exists between his gaze and his reflection, which Iosilzon teases us with, but withholds: in the pool all we see are the biomorphic forms typical of her work.
The Echo and Narcissus narrative has been understood as expressing anxieties about the image. Many ancient and modern cultures across the globe have superstitions or taboos around mirrors and photographs. By these accounts, the image imperils the soul and the self. The myth of Narcissus warns of how an image might distract, wound and derange the beholder. An image might consist of nothing, as Ovid is constantly reminding us, but it still has the power to destroy someone’s life. These ideas have an obvious significance in a contemporary culture shaped by social media that
encourage users to invest their all their value, meaning and sense of self in images. Our desire to be seen and known and liked is negotiated through images. We communicate with others through images; we construct and gratify our desires through images. Narcissus, who is so paralysed by an image of himself that he renounces all real connections, feels like a recognisable character in the current landscape of technologically mediated self-obsession. When the nineteenth century psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud used the figure of Narcissus as the basis of his theory of Narcissism, he couldn’t have known how this concept would morph to meet the proclivities of the present, where it can often feel as though an excessive interest in and admiration of yourself is not a cause for alarm, but the new norm.
Iosilzon’s reimagining of Narcissus asks us to consider how we might live within our image-saturated society in a more imaginative way. Nobody wants to share the fate of Narcissus or Echo as told by Ovid. Needlessly isolated, withering away, losing any chance of intimacy or self-knowledge. What’s the alternative? There might be no concrete answer, but Iosilzon’s Narcissus suggests we retain our sense of joy and play, and to make sure we aren’t always gazing directly into the pool, but looking beyond it to the world around us.
— essay by Dr. Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Fellow at The University of St Andrews and Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Birrell is author of This Dark Country; Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century.