Portraits usually have glinting eyes. Painted windows normally lead to painted views. Still lifes tend to be small. Assumptions which these subtly convention stretching pictures quietly undercut. Eyes are supposed to be the focal point of a portrait, the point where it comes to life. In both Self Portrait (4.) and Self-portrait with shell (2023), we instead find something like the shorthand, dot & eyebrow notation of William Nicholson’s Geoffrey Taylor (1931) (6.), Marie Laurencin’s dark almonds, the black pearls of Julian Opie’s 'Alex, bassist. 2000' (2000) (5.). But this kind of abbreviation can be an expressive proposal in itself. (Rotate the eye in Self-portrait with a shell slightly over 90-degrees to the left, magnify it several times, and it becomes the blank aeroplane window of Fear (2022)). There’s a coolness (in both senses of the word), a detachment; the ‘sensitivity’ of the face more to do with the cultural significance of the floppy fringe, perhaps. And while Self-portrait reveals plenty of ‘life’ and nuance up-close (look at the jaundiced ‘white’ in the right eye), in Self-portrait with shell the face literally becomes a still life: one thing placed next to another, one shell placed next to another.
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Remoteness and presence, dead-ness and alive-ness are recurring equations here, just as they always are at some level in portraiture: dealing, as it must, with the gap between a living person and a static collection of painted marks. There’s some sense here of fluidity – the highlight between the temple and the lock of hair in Self-portrait a bird-like shape, recalling the eagle or wing emoji, suggesting a certain fugitive quality to the sitter. (As in Bonnard’s late self-portraits, an expressive highlight on the side of the head takes the place of obvious highlights in the eyes). But it’s equally set, fixed – the paint ‘liquid’ but dry. Ossified even, if we turn to the barnacled Studio view (shell) (2023) (3.): a picture which recalls James Pryde’s fanciful paintings of ruins with their gaping windows and almost coral-like texture (1.). (Though here, close tones interlace in a kind of painterly camouflage, as if the building were trying to evade a predator).
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With its jumps in scale (the building could be a model castle in an aquarium) and ambiguous time of day, Studio view (shell) also suggests an underexplored link between Pryde and the Italian metaphysical painters – di Chirico, de Pisis, Morandi. (Except Morandi would never have tolerated this merging of genres and de Pisis would never have painted this thickly or gloomily). The shell itself was a recurring device for those painters. They found a certain poetry in its dispensability, its vacated, cast-off qualities, as well as its internal/external ambiguities. Likewise, we sense that the studio building extends to enclose itself, perhaps with a courtyard in the middle: winding back on itself like the shell, which conversely opens and unfurls like a giant flower in the dim sunlight. It's a rare moment of expansion in a series of pictures that are more often about contraction and claustrophobia. The roller-blind in Blinds (2023) denies entry, swaps depth for surface, just as the portraits are clearly images captured in mirrors – flat/dead on arrival. Extending the notion of bodies and surfaces, the pale, cross-structured expanse across the blind could almost be an elongated torso, the fabric like skin, the body rolled-over, flattened, rolled-up. This might be a case of over-interpretation but it’s hard to avoid in context, confronted as we are with a series of estranged encounters with the body/self.
Maybe I’m also making too many historical references here, which could be misleading. They’re emphatically ‘present’ paintings for all their remoteness, as of-their-time as any painting. Partly because they’re also so clearly observational. (Observational painting is always at once pretty trad, but also weirdly and palpably present tense). They’re also about observation – looking, and being looked at. With it comes a sense of anxiety as we peer over windowsills, draw the blinds, retreat from the world. Sink to the bottom of the tank.
1. James Pryde, The Husk (c.1920)
2. Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta (1943)
3. Leo Arnold, Studio view (shell) (2023)
4. Leo Arnold, Self-portrait (2023)
5. Julian Opie, (‘Alex, bassist. 2000’) Alex James (2000)
6. William Nicholson, Geoffrey Taylor (1931)
Leo Arnold, Schelpenbed runs at Loveday, London 16/11/2023-23/12/2023
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How does Maurice Utrillo’s 1912 painting, Église de Deuil (or, ‘The Little Communicant’), fit within the shape of French thought in the years before the First World War while extending his own very personal balance of hope and despair?
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Painting Nerds Reviews: Victoria Morton & Merlin James: "Double Shuffle" at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin: 2nd June – 8th July 2023
https://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibit... .
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Lots of films lift things from real-world paintings – but how have movies used paintings as integral elements of the story?
A shameless attempt to snag more views...and it worked!
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How do observation, openness and chance find their way into minimal abstraction?
Using Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's infamous 'Oblique Strategies' to think our way through the discreet poetry of Sylvia Plimack Mangold...
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Wrote a essay to accompany Mapping Landscapes at Stoppenbach & Delestre.
'...Rhodes’ pictures represent an increasingly ‘connected’ idea of landscape and how one place exists in relation to another – matched by an increasing sense of personal disconnect from the environments we transit through. It’s a conception of landscape apparently very far away from the secluded enclosure of Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s wonderfully titled Le Chemin montant sous les arbres à Ville-d’Avray/The Path going up under the trees at Ville-d’Avray (c.1870-1875). It’s a picture in which the world appears to be fully known and understood, a world of bringing firewood from the forest to the house (what could be an old man with a walking stick suggests a lifetime of the same comings and goings). And yet Corot is enigmatic. The picture is suspended and eternal but also volatile and shifting. Agitated. House and boat sit next to one another in the distance – two tiny triangles with very different meanings. It could all change with the wind, or a swipe of the hand, or the viewer’s mood. In some ways it’s a world just as baffling as Rhodes’ (surely ‘the path going up under the trees’ could be an equally fitting title for her Forest and Road?). As with most great landscape painting, Le Chemin montant sous les arbres à Ville-d’Avray is as much about mapping the shifting terrain of human consciousness as it’s about picturing the environment through which it passes.'
('Up Under the Trees': Mapping the Map)
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Wrote a short text for the catalogue of 'Maquettes' – a show of small study-type works curated by Robert Moon at Now Show Space.
'...Maquettes speak the common language of thinking through making. In some ways they catch an artist’s work at the point where it isn’t quite so far from another’s. It’s where they go from here that difference and identity really seem to set in. Or set in much more emphatically – because of course we can already point to difference and identity. Both Moon’s and Tuttle’s ‘completed’ works retain maquette-like qualities, yet the way they retain these qualities, the degree to which they retain these qualities is totally different. Tuttle's sliding scale from ‘maquette’ to ‘finished’ is so short it’s practically un-observable, while Moon makes a balletic leap between the two definite but related positions, each perpetually pointing back to the other. Moon’s paintings are semi-pristine, visual-thought-objects; the maquettes their crumpled baby photos. Worlds apart in size and finish, both are paper aeroplanes thrown at the possible...'
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