Gerry Judah at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Gallery Guide

When is a painting not exactly a painting? Gerry Judah’s paintings occupy an uneasily anxious zone mid-way between painting and sculpture. Given that their obsessive subject matter - and Gerry Judah is nothing if not obsessive - is the terrible aftermath of conflict, this uneasy occupation seems to rhyme with their meaning. They hang from the wall, but they are built out from it, weirdly, and in a way that, when we look at them, and peer down into them, as if with the eye of a bird or a drone, almost induces a sickening sense of vertigo. They seem to be clinging to the surface of the canvas as if by some miracle. They show us an entirely shattered zone of conflict, human habitations which have been pulverized almost out of existence. We recognise bits and piece of tottering, leaning, listing shapes. These were once fairly drab municipal buildings or apartment blocks. None of these structures was an object of beauty. Paradoxically, they seem to have gained a little more magnificence, a little more grandeur, in their extreme decrepitude, in the way in which they seem to be crying out to us for pity. Look to the left and to the right of these collapsing buildings, and you see that the surface of the painting is pitted with fragmentary shapes, scorings of lines, odd ribbings, some circular, others straight. Is this evidence of earlier human occupation? As you look, you dig in with the eye of the archaeologist, combing the surface for fragmentary evidence of what may once have been here. Paintings usually have a flat surface and traffic, often quite easily, in the nature of illusion. There is nothing easily illusory here. Everything is a bit betwixt and between.

   Yes, everything is ruined and posthumous here; everything represents some terrible, settled aftermath of the destruction of normality. This desolation on an epic, if not a theatrical, scale. And yet there are no people here to testify to what seems to have happened. There is no smeary blood letting of any kind. Apartment blocks lean into each other, as if for support in their tribulations. Smashed aerials and satellite dishes hang awry. The buildings are often so close together, so hugger mugger, that we can often barely see between them, and sometimes when we do try, we peer down into shafts of near-darkness. Things look fossilized, fused, almost buried in the canvas. And these battered and bruised fragments of buildings have to stand in for the complete absence of any evidence of human suffering.

    Judah works in two colours only, white and black. Most often white. Any other colour, you feel, would not be right for what he is endeavouring to do. Colour, variegated colour, is often a mighty distraction. It draws us off in different, and often quite serendipitous, directions. It seems to be playing many different tunes simultaneously. It introduces thoughts of the decorative. It invites us to single out, and then to separate, one thing from another, to play off this against that. It encourages different kinds of playfulness and levity.

   Judah wants none of this. He strives for a certain undistracted wholeness of vision, a sharp, unrelieved, singular focus. So white enshrouds everything. It is the colour of Pompeian dust. It is the colour of ghostliness. It is the colour of a shroud. Yes, this white is enshrouding everything which is unspeakable, and it feels so eerie and hushed and set apart from us.

   The paintings are of two shapes, rectangular and circular. The rectangle suggests the customary idea of the landscape. When we look at a rectangle, we fall into the idea of landscape – such is our cultural conditioning. With the circle it is quite different. With the circle, the eye finds it more difficult to come to rest. It has to be pinioned in some way, and Judah has pinioned one of these circular paintings by creating a formation of buildings in the shape of the symbol of the cross. We still see the same remnants of human habitation here, but they are aligned, symbolically, on a north-south, east-west axis. The atmosphere of this circular painting is quite different from that of the others. It seems to occupy a different kind of space. It feels, because of its shape, more globally marooned, more rootless, more islanded, more symbolic than actual, more iconic than pictorial.

   All these paintings begin in model-making – in Gerry Judah’s studio in north London you can see the models lined up, made from foam board, all beautifully detailed, one behind another, a whole series of what look like rather dreary Eastern European – or perhaps Middle Eastern - apartment blocks. But this work is not about model-making. Model-making is merely its point of departure. After the models have been attached to the canvas, Gerry Judah then begins to destroy them – on the day I visited, he suddenly showed me how, with his clenched fist.

   Yes, this is only the beginning. Then comes the real work - of adding plaster, paint, rubble, glazes until, having passed through the influence of Tapies, Rauchenberg and others, we begin to move much closer to the idea of the re-invented painting. Yes, this is, finally, as much what the work is concerned with: issues of texture, light, painted surface. But let us not forget the overwhelming sense of menace.    

Barry Fantoni: Public Eye, Private Eye Thomas Williams Fine Art, London W1 - The Independent

Of a Saturday night, you can often catch him in the bar at the Chelsea Arts Club, swinging a tenor sax from side to side, blowing out his lungs. Today Barry Fantoni, veteran Private Eye cartoonist, is showing off half a century of paintings and drawings, large, medium and small – portraits of women, still lifes, landscapes, cartoons - in a high-toned, first-floor gallery overlooking Old Bond Street. There is no chronological arrangement about this show. You begin at the end, and end at the middle – which feels about right for this agreeably talented shapeshifter of a man. Some are on the walls, others are propped up on chairs. It all feels a bit sprawly and slightly raucously glass-clinking. The styles are all fairly casual mix’n’match too – it’s as if Fantoni  has been moving from tailor to tailor in the past fifty-odd years, trying on things for style, finding out what suits the moment. Is it to be the replication of a Rubens today or a take on Mondrian? Well, how does it look out of doors?

In the 60s, Fantoni was part of the Pop Art scene, and here’s a painting of the Fab Four in 1963 to prove it – painted in that rather flattened, brash, commercial way that the pop artists made their own.

Sometimes Barry likes to sit back and contemplate the passing scene – there is a small series of bucolic looking Spanish roofs here, and another - one of the best paintings in the show – of a corner of Clapham Common and the Windmill pub, dominated by beautifully wispy trees. When he paints figures (usually women) in a room, he places them very carefully, slightly off centre, to give the tiniest edge of anxiety, and focuses our attention – in fact, gives exaggerated emphasis to - the seductive power of the eyes. Much of the show sees him responding to figures in the public eye, catching the mood of the times for the dailies  – he had a spell as front-page cartoonist for The Times - keeping up with the relentless now, now, now of the present.

Here is Harold Macmillan sitting up in bed, rigid, looking like a startled puppet in desperate need of the absent puppeteer. Another drawing, of 1963, gently satirises that fierce, all-action queen of the ‘60s, the high-leather-booted Honor Blackman, sitting in front of a two-bar electric fire, wrapped in a shawl, reading a book called Acting for Late Starters, other books strewn carelessly about her feet – Yoga; How to Stay Young -  while her husband, partially concealed from view, catches up with the ironing. The satire gets a bit fiercer when he turns his guns on a moustachioed Billy Butlin, king of the seaside holiday camp business - except that Fantoni has drawn him as a Nazi camp commander, with rolls of barbed wire and watchtowers at his back. Could it really have been as bad as that for all those holiday makers during works’ weeks?

And just around another corner, there’s a scene from the fag end of the ‘60s, when everyone had grown weary of the cynicism of old Labour politics. Yes, it’s Harold Wilson himself, on a Private Eye front cover, craftily bibulous, with a ‘sod the lot of you’ look in his pouchy eye, and a glass of tonic wine raised up high to toast us for our infinite patience over a decade of scheming and procrastinating.

Which is the real Fantoni? Where is his heart in all of this? You may well ask. It’s quite difficult to say. The really fine work is not located in any particular decade. There’s a lovely and slightly sombrely watchful self portrait from quite early on, and some quite tenderly meticulous early landscapes of London scenes, almost as small as pages from Constable’s sketch books. And a pleasing nostalgia-soaked scene of Brockwell Park Lido in the summer, teeming with skinny – that dates it – frolicking bodies. But Fantoni always wants to be off and away. There’s always another mountain to climb, always another riff to be blown or another fine suit to stride out in.

 

Hockney: Just Nature - The Independent, London 30 April 2009

Now here’s a curious fact. If you want to really understand what David Hockney has been pouring his energies into these past several years, you need to visit a museum in a small, medieval town in Swabia. Why could this not have happened in England? The question hangs in the air, waiting for a collective response from the curators of England’s great cultural institutions.

   It has to be said that Hockney seemed, for large tracts of time, to be off the boil during the '80s and '90s – think of those dreadfully garish, sub-Picasso abstracts, or the cringing, chocolatey paintings of his beloved dogs. There’s been a dramatic change in recent years though. A change of subject matter. And a change of location. The name Hockney no longer means the heat-struck langours of Southern California.

   Hockney’s now back living in Yorkshire, his natal county, and he’s painting the East Yorkshire landscape en plein air just like those Impressionists used to do. He’s out at the crack of dawn, when the light’s at its best and the shadows at their longest, pootering along narrow, deserted, twisty country lanes in his old car. He’s living in the house in Bridlington which he once bought for his mother and sister, and he’s wrestling with his new theme with tremendous energy and gusto – especially for a man of 72. When you walk around this exhibition, which is occupying the entire two floors of this large museum in the little town of Swabisch Hall, you are astonished by how much work he’s painted over such a relatively short span of time. And it’s not only the works themselves, it is also the scale of these works – many of these paintings are multi-panelled. Some consist of six panels; the largest (which had an airing at the Royal Academy’s summer show two years ago) is made up of 50 – 50! – panels. For Hockney, painting a single canvas on this kind of scale is out of the question because once you’re up a ladder, you can’t get the same flexibility of handling. You’re always considering issues such as safety and balance. So – ever technologically astute - he makes a mock up of the finished multi-panelled painting on the computer screen, but only ever works on discrete bits of it. Then the whole thing gets assembled. The tragedy about the hanging of this particular work here - and it is in fact an ink-jet reproduction of the work we saw at The Royal Academy, and not the thing itself – is that it is hung at the bottom of a stairwell, which partially obscures it from view. (What also troubles us is slightly is the fact that it seems neither better nor worse in reproduction.)

   Like the Impressionists also, Hockney wants to chart the changing of the seasons, and so we see several different views of the same triumvirate of great of trees or of the same rutty track, canopied like a chapel. Last Friday afternoon, he said how eager he was to get back to nature as quickly as possible because the next few days and weeks were crucial. ‘It’s action time,’ he said, with some evident frustration that he was stuck indoors in a smart grey suit. Then he went back to drawing on his IPhone – as he’s wont to do when faced by interminable questions from earnest German journalists.

   But how good are these paintings? Has Hockney brought something distinctive to this hoary old subject? Yes and no. The paintings are at their best when seen from a considerable distance – say, about 40 feet away. Then you grasp the way in which he has dealt with space, and don’t get tangled up in too much detail. You see how much he is enjoying the sheer theatricality of nature, her tricksy habits. Close up, the brush work can look a bit globby and gloopy and laboured and clotted and crude. He is brilliant when he is being most rash with his colour contrasts, when he seems to be transforming the countryside into some tremendous set for the Metropolitan Opera, when he’s erring on the side of the Fauvishly fanciful. Some of his brashest and most successful paintings are of felled trees and tree stumps. ‘Totem Tree’, for example, looks like a stubby, indomitable sacred symbol. It’s painted in a glorious, full-frontally naïve manner, vividly anti-naturalistic, and not wholly unlike Van Gogh.

   This curmudgeonly Yorkshireman is going to slosh on the paint till he drops.

The Turner Prize Shortlist - The Independent, 29 April 2009

We have seen Enrico David’s work fairly recently outside Tate Britain and inside the Saatchi Gallery. At Tate, a gong fashioned to look like a chicken man, complete with a pretty stockinged foot for a base, just couldn’t wait to be smitten. His pieces posture and flaunt, fling themselves about exhibitionistically. They are loosely embedded in the tradition of commedia dell’arte, but they look crude and unsophisticated by comparison, too intent to hammer home tediously obvious points about gender politics. They are folksy – he is very fond of needlework and hand-stitching. They are also screamingly, if not jarringly, colourful in a way that rather makes you wince, but they lack any real delicacy or profundity. This man is keen to be applauded for being truly outrageous, and keen to make works that look swooningly pretty. This vamped-up, look-at-me-and-what-I’ve-done-sweetie manner palls after about five or six seconds of close – no need to get too close - examination. If David really wants to see how a great artist uses posture and colour, he should take a trip to the Kuniyoshi show at the Royal Academy.

Cambridge-born, multi-media artist Lucy Skaer recently gained some public attention for herself by secretly smuggling moth and butterfly pupae into London’s Central Criminal Court in the vain hope that they might hatch mid-session. What a futile and pointlessly attention-seeking exercise! In fact, the best of her work is much more interesting and deserving of attention than this bit of fatuous gimmickry might suggest. She bases a lot of what she does on found photographic images, as in a fine piece that was recently exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery called ‘Diagrams and Banners’. Here we stared at a curiously ghostly image of a dead man, with blood coursing down his face, and painted, fairly faintly and delicately, in red enamels. But this image – which seemed to be receding from us as we examine it - slowly melded with and merged into another image. The patterning of the face, as our eyes strayed down its length, turned into the patterning of a chinese bowl. So what began in a randomly chosen photographic source first of all changes into a painting, and then ended up as a kind of eerily shifting collage. It was work of real subtlety.

At least half of this shortlist – the half that isn’t fairly muted and quietly cerebral - is meant to razzle-dazzle us, to show us that contemporary art is all about hey! Whoa! And what is this! Roger Hiorns is certainly a spectacle man, an artist who believes in scooping us up bodily, and dumping us down somewhere other than where we would normally go. In ‘Seizure’, a recent Artangel project, he set about transforming a perfectly dreary modern flat at the Elephant and Castle, and turning it into a kind of glitzy, blinking and winking Aladdin’s Cave by coating all the walls in half a tonnage of blue copper sulphate crystals. It felt as if you were walking around the interior of a giant gemstone-encrusted cave – except that the walls and the doorframes were a bit too regular for a cave. Over at Tate Britain on another occasion, he played a slightly different alarming trick – a fire grate out in the street was suddenly seen to spout a jet of flame. The flames of Hades had risen to the surface! The only thing missing were the howls of the damned. So if art is about all-enveloping, in-your-face spectacle, and if the only truly thrilling and soul-stirring night of the year is Firework Night, Hiorns is your man. But is art really about nothing but no-holds-barred spectacle? Isn’t that really the role of popular entertainment?

Richard Wright, easily the oldest of the four contenders at the grand old age of 49, is the one truly oddball choice in this shortlist. In spite of the fact that he is the only artist to be represented by a gallery of international clout and reputation – Larry Gagosian – he is not at all a household name, and his face seems to be set entirely against all the noise and all the clamour of the pantingly youthful rest. Wright is a draughtsman who often turns up to do his work in situ. It’s not usually pre-conceived. He looks at a space – a large wall or a medium–size window embrasure, for example – and he sets to work, drawing and drawing with his hand, laboriously. And what exactly does he draw? It could be any of a great variety of things – baroque curlicues in a rhythmical formation, or a mixture of stripes or geometrical shapes overlaid with circles. He tries to impose a new rhythm upon any space where he works, to lead our eye differently, depending upon the nature of the drawn dance he’s proposing with a kind of shy, courteous delicacy. It’s all quite cerebral, and quite unemphatic - especially given the fact that the drawings often get over-painted after the exhibition is closed. So Wright is into evanescence, vanishing, ego suppression. How unusual! How un-Turner can you get?

Faces in the Crowd: the art of portraiture - The Independent, London

What's in a face? This week the National Portrait Gallery in London announced its shortlist of three artists who will be in contention for this year’s annual BP Portrait Award. It contained a fairly familiar mix of subjects: an artist’s daughter, represented as a changeling by the English painter, Peter Monkman; an artist’s son, fleetingly caught between boyhood and manhood by Michael Gaskell in a manner which suggests that the painter has been looking long and hard at both Holbein and Botticelli; and a portrait of a friend, whose character looks intriguingly indefinable, by Italian painter Annalisa Avancini. The winners will be announced on 16 June, and the show will be on display throughout the summer.

The BP Award has been on the annual arts calendar for almost 20 years. It was set up in 1990 to encourage young painters to take figurative painting in general, and portraiture in particular, seriously as a medium at a moment when the more traditional disciplines seemed to be on the point of drowning beneath wave upon wave of new-media innovation. Once upon a time it was only for the young - you had to be under forty to enter. These days painters of any age can have a go. And they do. The prize is a fairly generous one. First prize was £10,000 when the award was established. Now it is £25,000, although that sum hasn’t budged for a decade.

The BP Award is highly popular with the general public, and increasingly so with artists. This year there were nearly 2,000 entries, which represents a ten per cent increase on last year. The reason for this popularity is a relatively simple one. The exhibition seems to prove that art, after all, can be about truth to our own experience of life. Generally speaking, the subject matter is familiar to all of us. These are the people that we know - or could easily know - and live with, and painted in a manner which strikes the viewer as companionable. There is no abstraction here. It is as if abstraction and whatever it may once have represented to the deluded few had never really existed at all, that it was just a tiny blip, a matter of laughable inconsequence, and that the world of painting has been set to rights, once and for all.

The popularity of the BP Portrait Award is indicative of a new interest in portraiture in general, which is itself stimulated by the number of competitions for portraiture, both painted and photographic, which now exist – flickr’s Portrait Classics Competition, for example; the annual exhibition by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and the ICCA competition for digital photos. The show of Gerhard Richter’s painted portraits, also on display at the National Portraits at the National Gallery and discussed more fully below, has been hugely popular.

   Once upon a time portraiture was the exclusive preserve of those who had the means to commission such tributes - only the rich and the influential could be immortalized. Only their images would survive. Now it is open to all. We can all outlive ourselves. This is a portraiture without social boundaries.

The subject has been kicked into new life for a whole range of reasons, not the least of which is the ease with which the digital camera now captures images of us all and transfers them, instantaneously, to social networking sites. We are becoming increasingly accustomed to chronicling and snooping on every movement of our lives, and this interest most often manifests itself in portraits of each other at play. We simply can’t get enough of looking at ourselves and each other, drunk or sober, at any hour of the day or night, for better of for worse.

This kind of art, colourful and embraceable, has something to do with the democratic impulse, the wish to share, readily and freely, to incline us to agree that one person is the equal of another. There is no singling out of privileged groups here, no sense that we do not belong to the world that we are looking at, that it is somehow judging us or admonishing us, making us feel slightly small and cowed in its presence. A sign painter grins back at us, levellingly confident as any judge pounding his gavel from the bench.

All this makes us feel cheerful, as if we are all at the same party. It also provokes a slight feeling of unease, that we may after all be missing something, that life may after all be a bit more than this. Yes, something is not quite as it should be – in spite of the fact that we are all getting an equal share of the attention. There is, somewhere here, we often feel, as we look at all these paintings crammed together in these galleries (yes, there is always a feeling that as much has been crammed in as possible, and that we are strolling – or perhaps elbowing – our way through a kind of cheery, noisy, small-town market square rather than an exhibition with all those slightly old-fashioned rules of silence and set-apartness) an underlying wish on the part of the National Portrait Gallery not to make human experience seem too difficult, too painful, too obtuse, too hard to grasp, too complicated, too challenging.

And yet you could say that life is difficult, hard to grasp, painful and obtuse, and that work of this kind is, finally not only too easy on the eye, but also a way of not quite telling the entire truth about the deeper truths of what we are.

If this is the case, it would be consistent with much of the entire history of portraiture, which has been, from its very inception, the art of telling lies palatably.

 

Portraiture has been with us for at least five thousand years – the Egyptians excelled at it, as did the Romans. And there is nothing which tells porkies about the human condition quite so effectively as portraiture. This has always been the case. Human beings - and especially those human beings who rule over others - cannot bear too much reality. Reality is too imperfect, too messy, too much inclined towards ugliness, disproportion and disorder to be left to its own devices. Reality is, in short, staunchly asymmetrical when we crave the reassurance of symmetry.

Human beings in positions of influence do not want to confront these truths. If reality is like that, it needs to be adjusted. They want to be shown to be other than what they are. And the artisans who are responsible for creating these portraits are in the pay of those who commission them. A Pharaoh and a Pope have much in common in this respect. The Great one holds the purse strings. He is the puppet master, and the artisan a mere puppet in his hands. The Great One wants to continue to be seen to be great in the hereafter. It is he, finally, who is responsible for the manipulation of the image.  

This was the case with the tomb sculptures of the Egyptians and the Romans. Those who were alive wanted, most of all, to align themselves with an immaterial world which would never pass away. And so their own images were not only juxtaposed with images of gods and other fabulous beings. They were also exalted and beautified in their turn, transformed into simulacra of themselves which looked much more serene and exalted than their mere counterparts in life.

The same habits continued down the centuries. Think of the Christian God and his virgin mother, and how yieldingly beautiful they look in the paintings of Raphael, how much they outstrip mere earthly perfections. All the more terrible then when this gloriously comely male image of the beautiful is harassed and scourged and crucified. We feel almost as much for the violation of a beautiful model as we do for the killing of a god. Perhaps even a little more. Titian strains to immortalise his human sitters too, to put them on a level with the pagan gods,physically, mentally, giving them a dash and a sense of indomitability. Another variant on the same theme occurred a little later, during the second decade of the seventeenth century, when painters from the Netherlands such as Van Dyck memorialised the doomed court of Charles I. Van Dycks’s portraits were intended to flatter their subjects into believing in their own greatness and courtly splendour.

To every rule there is also a cussed exception. Flattering one’s sitters was something which didn’t come naturally to Goya at the beginning of the nineteenth century – even when they were the royalty of Spain, and you happened to be in their pay as official court painter. With Jean Dominique Ingres, when he painted Napoleon in his study, ever wise, ever watchful, ever awake, we return to the same tradition of flattery. Lies, all lies, you might say.

And, as with the Egyptians, the living were shown alongside objects which enhanced their importance - symbols of earthly power, for example – or wore clothes whose splendour resonated with the awe-struck onlooker, so sad in his fustian. In short, every possible means was used to steer the viewer away from reflecting upon the awkward fact that beneath all this visual fanfare, there is that which is common to all of us - mere tremulous flesh and bone.

This is why when Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, some painters began to heave a sigh of relief, which was almost inaudible at first. Here was another medium, photography, which could do reality’s dirty work for them. Painting was now free to do as it pleased – if it so chose. One small group of revolutionaires – that group which came to be known as the Impressionists, for example – tried to paint light. What an impossible dream that was! Fortunately for them, light proved to be very pretty, and their works highly collectible. The revolutionaries became, in time, almost as popular as bread. Revolution had quickly joined hands with commerce.

So, in the aftermath of the development of photography, portraiture of the kind to which we were so long accustomed almost died away altogether for many of the painters whose work we most value. And it is simply not a medium with which we much associate the art of the twentieth century, except somewhat tangentially. Or, if artists did resort to it at all, it often seemed to be almost unrecognizably inhuman, to strain credibility. Why?

The painters of the twentieth century suffered the burden of living through times which saw more death and suffering than ever before. What is more, thanks to the fact that people could move about much more freely, and that, thanks to the marvels of telegraphy, information passed from place to place with a lightning swiftness, this suffering was known about and felt on the pulses with a terrible immediacy. Think of how Picasso responded to the terrible bombing of Guernica, for example. It was as if the speed with which the facts became known had to be matched by the speed with which he worked, night after sleepless night, at his studio in the Rue des Augustins.  So reality, for many artists, became a terrible, fractured thing, almost unbearable – godless, pitiless, without redemption - and portraiture itself a terrible, twisted, pain-wracked thing. And it is this sense of terrible, almost unbudgeable oppression that enters into the portraiture – when the painters choose to paint portraits at all. Think of the portraits of Picasso or Bacon or Kossoff or Auerbach. We stare at almost unrecognisable human beings. It is as if the face has been pulverised and re-made in the tortured image of something so bleak that it is barely recognizable as a human face at all.

Yes, the face. Everything tends to pivot about the face in portraiture. It is the place towards which the eye naturally navigates in order to understand the full nature of what it is to be human. When we see the face, and the eye at the centre of that face, and all that reassuring symmetry, we breathe a quiet sigh of contentment. We are home at last. Yes, the face is the pole star by which our heart and our intellect naturally steer. Which is why we throw up our hands in horror when we see Picasso’s faces of his wives and lovers. They are often ravaged, twisted things, horribly wrenched awry, like a mouthful of well masticated gum. And yet all this distortion, those great masters would argue, was necessary because to do otherwise would be to deny the destructive truth of humans on the world, to soften, to sentimentalise the world in which they lived.

Is this still the case? Some would disagree. Portraiture is back again, they would argue. The enthusiastic response, year on year, to the BP Portrait Awards, is one proof of that fact. That pall of bleakness has rolled away. Or perhaps we have learnt how to live our numbed, cynical, hedonistic lives within its omnipresence. What we also notice though – at the annual BP exhibitions and elsewhere - is that painting has made accommodations with the art of photography in different ways, and that this has fundamentally changed the way in which painters paint portraits.

Without photography, for example, the silly taste for hyper-realism in painting would not have happened. This is painting trying to compete with photography, an attitude which seems to proclaim: I too can be as minutely particular as you. I too can dissect every square centimeter of what you have photographed with such painstaking accuracy and replicate it on canvas. Can there be any point to such nonsense? And then there is the unassuageable appetite for casualness - casual chat, casual pose, casual sex - which is everywhere. The documentary art of photography catches life on the wing. Everything is provisional, unfinished, ragged – a little like unedited reality itself. Painters have envied this instantaneous ability to capture unmediated reality, and they have sought to do likewise.

One of the most fascinating experimentalists in portraiture of recent years has been Gerhard Richter, whose painted portraits are currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery too. This is a grainy, fleeting vision of life on the wing as never before. It combines two qualites which feel as though they could never really be in combination – an extraordinary sense of the ephemeral and the random, together with something which is brooding, relentlessly cerebral and analytical.

What is most stimulating about Richter’s extraordinarily painstaking painted portraits – which look as if they had their beginnings in grainy, poor quality photographs – is the way in which they remind us of the fact that those earlier, time-honored traditions of idealized portraiture were extraordinarily rigid, and that this need not have been the case at all. They were rigid because of the rigidities of the conventions to which they were faithful. Richter’s images are grainy, grey, fleeting and blurry - and yet, paradoxically, they feel full of content. But that content is all about what they are not. That content seems to be in conversation with the sitters of many of those portraits of earlier centuries, and this is what it seems to be saying: the very fact that you may have wanted to be depicted face on in a very particular way, in those expensive clothes that you chose to wear, surrounded by those comfortable ancestral objects by which you chose to surround yourself, has nothing whatsoever to do with truth telling, and everything to do with the way you chose to present yourself in that society where you had been striving, life-long, to make your mark and where, yes, you did indeed make your mark, though not quite to the extent that you may have wished.

Some onlookers, slightly cowed and impressed, have taken it for the unvarnished truth about yourself, but they were mistaken. They could not see the wood for the tress. In fact, that image was nothing but a social construct, wasn’t it,  made for a very particular purpose, which was to flatter yourself? Now go away and bear this in mind.

So when we next read that portraiture puts us in touch with the ‘perenially human’ or some such tosh, what we need to ask ourselves is this: to what extent is this the old, familiar game of self-flattery, played, as ever, to keep the wolf from the door?

 

 

 

 

Galileo: Images of the Universe from Antiquity to the Telescope Palazzo Strozzi, Florence - The Independent

It is four hundred years since the Pisan-born Galileo Galileo found an object being sold as a toy in Venice which rather intrigued him. It consisted of a long tube with two magnifying lenses, one at either end. The possibilities which Galileo saw in this device led to the development of the telescope, and to accurate sky-gazing for the very first time – and, finally, to his condemnation by the Catholic Church for heresy, and house arrest until the end of his life.

   Galileo’s own story is told in the final two galleries of this exhibition, which is being displayed in one of those ferociously indomitable-feeling Florentine palazzi. The rest of the show tells the story of the relationship between man and the heavens, from antiquity onwards. It is a vast exercise in brilliant, but slightly chilly and brain-numbing, no-holds-barred pedagogy, from first to last. There is always another wall text to read, and always another theme to wrestle with. Every room is crammed to the gills with objects: maps, books, cuneiform tablets, paintings, scientific instruments, star charts, astrolabes, orreries. The real rubs shoulders with the virtual. There are about two hundred and fifty objects here in all, but you wouldn’t know that from the arcane system used to number each one of them – which, incidentally, doesn’t seem to match the numbering system of the catalogue. Projections of the sky are projected onto ceilings. In spite of the fact that this is a sixteenth-century building, the show itself is contained – more constrained than contained - within a labyrinthine series of windowless, relatively low-lit and low-ceilinged rooms. Floors and walls are a glittery black. Everything feels pent and cornered and thrust forward, a-throb with scientific significance – like an unopened can of beans above a naked flame. The effect is dazzling - but also rather strangulatory. In spite of the fact that the spaces of the buildings itself have great processional possibilities – that was demonstrated quite recently in a show here devoted to objects from the T’ang Dynasty –here there is no sense of pacing at all, and when we do finally come across Galileo and evidence of his astonishing achievements in those final rooms, it comes as something of a shock – like suddenly meeting a human being on a corner in the middle of the night. We hadn’t known it was about to happen. And then, all of a sudden the exhibition ends, and you feel you have hit a brick wall, and are being kicked out into the street.

   So, yes, Galileo himself is what, finally, sticks to us, and the objects associated with him, and his story, all of which are of enduring fascination – how he got the Medicis on his side, and then was finally forced to foreswear everything that he had ever done at the hands of the church. Here is the letter which describes his discovery of spots on the sun’s surface, and here is his objective lens, set within a wonderfully fussy frame of ivory, gilded brass and ebony. There is a touching element of bathos about this particular exhibit – the lens itself was dropped during Galileo’s own lifetime so, though stunning enough, you can see that it is in bits.  

   And yet, and yet, within a little over one hundred years, he was virtually a secular saint. A genius, when he falls, must rise again, some time. In 1737 his remains were exhumed, and his body moved to a monumental sepulchre in the Florentine church of Santa Croce. And his finger was placed inside a small glass reliquary. We can see that finger here, long, pointing upwards, leaning (like the tower of his natal place) and, understandably enough, somewhat shrunken. And then there is the telescope he used, beautifully embellished, and somewhat resembling a stout walking stick, and his letters and small, fussy, feverish calculations too, all in a quite dense brown ink. Undeniable traces of the real man. And then, on the wall, the text of what he said when he was finally forced, in 1633, to turn his back on himself, and everything that he had achieved in the name of knowledge, science and human understanding.

   What could he have been thinking to himself when he read those words out loud to those stern-faced men who were so firmly faced away from the future?  

New Poetry of 2009 - The Tablet

The 20^th century gave us such a taste for lyric verse – poems on a relatively small scale that generally celebrated the exquisite emotions of the speaker - that it seems quite hard to remember that the Victorians excelled in story telling through poetry. Is story telling coming back into fashion amongst poets? Well, one fine collection of the new year is certainly firmly rooted in that tradition.

   In Darwin – a Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus, £12.99), Ruth Padel has written what amounts to a condensed biography of  the great scientist whose direct descendant she happens to be. The idea of a biography conjures up a terrible welter of often tediously superfluous detail. This is not the case with this book. It consists of a series of often quite short poems which focus upon key moments in the life of Darwin - call them small-scale epiphanies of self-discovery if you like. In spite of the fact that there are relatively few words in this book, it feels throughout much fuller than that because it seems to possess the emotional weight - and perhaps even the emotional resonance and the quite ponderous atmosphere - of a substantial piece of substantial Victorian fiction. A double-decker at the very least. Here is Darwin, warts and all, perpetually a prey to anxiety about his religious doubts, a situation whch was made all worse by the devoutness of his wife. This is a rich and very readable book.

   When we think of the poetry of Northern Ireland which came to maturity during the decades of The Troubles, our mind immediately alights upon the name - and the fame - of Seamus Heaney. In fact, there is  a near exact contemporary of Heaney’s who is quite his equal in talent and emotional and intellectual reach, and that is Derek Mahon. Mahon is, in the words of the late Michael Donaghy, the master of ‘the singing line’. He is an exquisite wordsmith whose poetry often seems inexhaustible. In his latest collection, Life on Earth (Gallery Press, 11.95 euros), the range of subject matter is as ever extraordinarily wide-ranging – from a poem which conjures up the atmosphere of Goa, to a meditation upon the life of his late friend, the novelist Brian Moore. The finest poem in the book is a beautifully crafted meditation upon insomnia, and it conjures up those lonely hours when the mind habitually roams and preys upon itself.

   Sometimes it is appropriate to celebrate the staying power of a poet. Peter Porter, born in Australia, but for many decades resident in London, has been writing and publishing substantial collections of poetry for more than half a century, and his new book, Better Than God (Picador, £8.99), is his best in a decade. Porter writes intimately, but he is also breezily connected to the foibles and the passing fashions of the world. By turns satirist and elegist, he writes with a worldly crispness and deftness, and a delight in the small-scale absurdities of life.

   Quite dramatically different in mood and manner is the poetry of Luxembourg’s Anise Koltz, whose first full collection to published in the United Kingdom – At the Edge of Night (Arc Publications, £9.99)- gives us the French text side by side with an English translation by Anne-Marie Glasheen. These are small, intense, spiky and emotionally vertiginous poems, full of fear, nausea and acute apprehension, in which the speaking voice of the poet often seems helpless in the face of  both personal experience – some of the harshest words in the book are reserved for her own mother – and human wickedness. They are acidic, troubling and extraordinarily memorable.

   David Constantine sculls us towards more visionary waters in Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe, £8.95). Constantine is a poet who has always dreamt wayward dreams in his poetry – one of the best of his earlier books was a full-length recounting in verse of the tale of Caspar Hauser, that boy who was kept shackled like a beast for many years, and then appeared, all of a sudden, in a small German town, beating on the door of a house with his forehead. Oddities. Odd human behaviour. Strange, quasi-religious moments in which we seem to be winged, snatched beyond the realm of the day-to-day. This is Constantine’s poetic terrain.