76A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONthe objectifying tendency of natural history illustration is subverted by a
different speculative aesthetic. Between 1999 and 2011, Fairnington pro-
duced twenty-two canvases capitalizing on a captivating realism com-
bined with an iconic compositional balance generating an overall sense
of supreme harmony. The attention to detail, once again, is impeccable,
and the overall impression of naturalism undeniable. Here, too, the artist’s
approach is critical—the paintings don’t just celebrate natural beauty,
but question the work of realism as the epistemic tool of representation;
they offer opportunities to develop awareness of interrelated ethical
and epistemic intricacies in the institutional representations of animals
and plants.
From this vantage point, it becomes possible to appreciate that his
paintings involve a series of nonaffirmative operations, the first of which
is clearly embedded in the title of the series. The name Flora suggests a
scientific focus on plants, but in opposition to the tradition of natural his-
tory illustration that separates animals from plants, the artist juxtaposes
them according to the rules of resemblance that governed the Renaissance
episteme.^2 Like the assembly of objects in a cabinet of curiosities, the
composition of plants in Tu ra c o G r e e n L a d y brings together flowers and
foliage sharing substantial morphological assonances despite being
wholly different species originating in distant geographical locations. In
The Parrot Plant, the vivid green of the bird’s plumage associates the
animal with the plants on which it perches, while its red collar shares
aesthetic affinity with the cherries the bird gazes at. Similar aesthetic re-
semblances are at play in The Golden Leaves, where the patterns on the
underside of the wings of two butterflies echo the flatness of adjacent
leaves and the colors on the fleshy surface of the flower of a nearby pitcher
plant. These nontaxonomic associations are problematized by the now of
photography and the implied past of painting that are made to interlace in
each image—the resulting time-space dimension that Farnington out-
lines further confuses livingness and death. The demise of precise referents
is in some paintings exacerbated by a deliberate disrespect for natural
scale—another measure of the real is challenged. In these paintings, re-
alism is essentially pushed to its linguistic dimension in natural history:
the very surface of things.