25. ANSELM KIEFER - A SPACE BETWEEN EXORCISM AND PRAYER.

Anselm Kiefer - Finnegans Wake, White Cube - LONDON.

Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Piled, rusted supermarket trollies​ -​ as if resurrected from the depths of rivers, where their weighted surrender was executed through nocturnal intoxication - are now repositioned in Kiefers' sober no-mans-land of reawakening. Where bouquets of pettleless sunflowers sprout, their seedheads drowned in charcoal paint, their monitoring faces desperately looking in every direction with every gasping breath.

An abandoned multi-wheel-chair demands attention, a crumpled chariot extraordinarily views as if still in motion - and yet, as with everything in Anselms' world - is paused - or somehow in the slow motion of changing states, so slow its kinetic shift is undetectable through human eyes - but atmospherically sensed.

A library of leaden books, open and abandoned on a concrete floor - their poisonous contents oxidised to methyl orange, toxic tarnished leaves blackened with mold. 

Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Uncoiled rusted barbed wire sprawls across a floor amassed with rubble, not from a fallen ceiling but installed and recreated as if confiscated - awaiting further analysis - a violation dismantled, an overwhelming tension disseminated.

Naked bulbs drip tentatively - like glistening pearls of sweat - exhausted with adrenaline. 

Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Into the corridors of the Kiefers' subconscious, to stare in fascination at countless vitrines whose contents are poetic metaphors and physical feelings preserved - with the clagging paints, plaster, and vandyke washes - dry in translucent layers.

Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Each artifact bares the artist's soul and touch - categorised with charcoal scribbled annotation - precisely stretching with lucid handwritten conviction.

Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

The shelves of this lost-and-found depot, store the codes of Anselm Kiefer's idiom - the sheaves of a summer's field, the chipped maquettes of the artist's corrugated architectural towers, the dried ferns and flowers, and seed heads - poised and tentative. The empty nests, rusted mechanisms and broken statues, feather-tipped scales, paper white shirts, and a mass of dented buckets - midas gold - glimmering in the shadows.

Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

The synaptic sparks of one man's mind seem to charge each item with a humm of concentration - where persistent unrelenting recalls meet discordant unravellings. 

All these moments caught in time and place, like trapped butterflies - still flickering with life - tender memories, nostalgic, pensive and painful, hysterical and vulnerable, squirreled away in the depths of a mind to be extracted to the surface like an exorcism or a prayer.

Image: Arnan Wang for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Image: Anselm Kiefer - courtesy of White Cube 2023.

Image: M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Anselm Kiefer - Finnegans Wake - Until 20 August 2023 - White Cube - London. Special Thanks: Arnan Wang, Tom Gu, and Isabelle Cook at White Cube.

24. CARRIE MAE WEEMS - A SPACE BETWEEN VIOLENCE AND COMPASSION.

Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now - Barbican - LONDON.

Carrie Mae Weems - Painting the Town #3, 2021 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

'It has to come through a space of compassion otherwise it is just anger.' Carrie Mae Weems.

Carrie Mae Weems's decisiveness is her strength, her response to her instincts, her power - pouring the water herself at a press conference, she waits for the microphone to work before responding to loaded questions with dignity and intelligence, consistent within a retrospective of works which are presented like a concentrated harvest. A harvest of some four decades - and it is divine to behold. Both in it's humility, it's humanity, and the sheer breadth of the artist's emotional range.

A series of paintings begin the exhibition, abstract expressionist in style, but in fact, these are documentary photographs, not paintings - 'made in the wake of demonstrations in the artist's birth town of Portland, Oregon, following the murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020. Over several months of protests, boarded-up storefronts were repeatedly painted over to erase demonstrators' messages. Within the work, the artist questions the visual language of abstraction and representation - reviewing and reminding us that Black artists have often been painted out of art history - including Norman Lewis who was an active contributor to the abstract expressionist movement since its inception. Abstraction emerges directly from a protest as a form of expression.

The rhythm of the exhibition undulates, from one room to the next and out into an in-between-space where swathes of blue velvet and white muslin house projected film works - a combination of circus tent and heavenly calm - overheard music escapes from these inter-woven curtained enclosures - layered in the air like the synaptic snaps from within artist's mind. Cross-referencing genres, soundtracks, and sound bites form a sensory collage - poised and swept up.

The film 'The Shape of Things: A Video in 7 Parts, 2021' a visual collage of extremes - devastatingly honest as Weems describes the unrelenting fear of violence from police brutality: 'Imagine the worst of the worst... and know that it is always happening', to the sublime beauty of five figures drenched in a storm including choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili who becomes enveloped by the night in a flurry of falling snow.

The artist's meditative approach to creation begins daily with music, 'music is the most important thing - everything rests on the melody', with a series of songs that remind her of her purpose. Listing Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, and Aretha Franklin - who she discusses in detail as 'The master standard’. Her technique of improvisation and reinvention of a media, 'taking it and breaking it', discussing the extraordinary fluidity of Franklin's vocal soaring agility to explore and propel music with an ability to define any song she sings as her own.

Carrie Mae Weems - Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Weems' own instincts of taking and breaking are certainly in evidence within 'Reflections for Now', using her own body as the medium for exploration and exhibition.'I use myself in part because I am available, a source, a surface - framing myself as muse, witness, arbitor, and observer'.

In the iconic 'Kitchen Table Series' Weems occasionally makes direct eye contact with the viewer, the life-size portraits and open table invite the audience's gaze and allow us to observe a woman in a private domestic space which now becomes a stage set with acts which both confront and remind that life is a volatile work all of its own. Like Franklin's emotive control which invites us to reflect, so too does Weems hold up a  mirror. 'I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy, polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and their children, and between women and other women - underscoring the critical problems and the possible resolves. In one way or another, my work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition. I'm determined to find new models to live by.'

In 'Holocaust Memorial', The artist moves with purpose between the pillars of Peter Eisenmann's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, completed in Berlin in 2005. In the projected film, Weems glides in dignified choreographed strides, arms bow - hands clap twice - hands reach up - and then returning - as if there are many figures with each repeating rhythm, an outpouring, a release, and return. 'Weems has spoken of an affinity between Black and Jewish communities, stating,'I think there is a shared sense of struggling in the country, and that, I think, forms an incredible bond between these two apparently very different groups of people'.

There are traces of violence with repeating force within this exhibition, from the causes and origins to the effects and legacies. The presentation is startling also for its dignity, tenderness, and overriding atmosphere of contemplation - creating a poised environment of reflective stillness - Weems herself asks 'No one has written about the violence in my work'.

Asking her mother what is grace, she answered: when one falls down, you reach back and help... what an offering - of love and forgiveness - the words are embedded in the work'.

Carrie Mae Weems, The Edge of Time — Ancient Rome from Roaming, 2006 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin.

Carrie Mae Weems Reflections for Now Barbican London,
22 June – 3 September 2023.

Special thanks: Georgia Holmes.

23. ELIZABETH PEYTON - A SPACE BETWEEN SUSPENSION AND FALLING.

Elizabeth Peyton: Angel - David Zwirner - LONDON.

Elizabeth Peyton - Elvis Angel (Elvis' Eyes), 2023 - Oil on linen board - 9 x 12 inches - 22.9 x 30.5 cm - © Elizabeth PeytonCourtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Staring out from David Zwirner's Grafton Street gallery, a few dozen - forever young eyes - look on from their painted canvases - whose white primer drips down like birthday icing on cakes still warm from an oven, not cold in a box.

Paintings intimately small as if cut from much larger pictures - Elizabeth Peyton's Angels focus in and fixate - with the specific abandon of adolescence.

The artist's perpetual focus for a time in suspension feels palpably strong within this tender show. Her lost boys span history and geography with the bittersweet ease of youth and the foreboding of imminent change - A time-state like a spell, that stays with some for a moment, for others a lifetime.

An expression observed in Mai Omai's sideways glance, in a teenage Elvis - lost in thought and in the amethyst eyes of a stranger looking away - an eyeline we will never catch. And it is within this specific pain of the unrequited - which fill her works to a meniscus brink - inky and bright with the light of a storm.

This atmosphere of transition is felt in the dappled pointillist brushstrokes of the American artists' impressionism. The experimental outdoor scenes of the C19th French Société Anonyme des Artistes, whose ambition to capture the changing light En plein air, so too does Peyton capture the fleeting - in her daubs of colour - like the ephemeral makeup markings on the back of a hand in a pharmacy aisle or the marker-pen scribblings on a stationer's pad. Her pictures often bear such tests in their corners, a metaphorical reminder, perhaps, that we are all a work in progress.

Elizabeth Peyton - Angel - David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street, London. Until 28 June, 2023.

Special Thanks: Sara Chan.

Image photograph: Arnan Wang.

22. PAUL GAUGUIN - A SPACE BETWEEN CONSCIOUSNESS AND SUBCONSCIOUSNESS.

After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, The National Gallery - LONDON.

THE colourist of the Symbolist movement Paul Gauguin forever and immediately recognised for his idiosyncratic palettes of sorrow. Colour combinations so precise that you can almost taste them and certainly feel them - the colours of heart​ache, painted over and over again. And just as in Edgar Allen Poe's poem, The Raven; which concludes most of it’s 18 stanzas with 'Nevermore'- The French artist and American poet share a relentless search within their mysterious works - but what was Gauguin searching for and did he ever find it?

Gauguin lived a life of such turbulence and restlessness that many clues in his biography pose more open-ended questions than answers. From a boyhood spent between France and Peru to joining the French Merchant Navy and then back to Paris to become a financial broker. A bourgeois family life followed when he lived with his five children and wife in the well-heeled 9th arrondissement. Gauguin was a collector of art before he started painting, amassing an avant-guard collection of impressionist works, many of which were painted by Paul Cézanne, whose holistically escapist Aix-en-Provance based lifestyle, must have inspired Gauguin to dream of a world not ruled by stocks and shares, rather by nature and the sensual shift of the seasons.

Pahura rests her head on a pillow the shade of Oenothera biennis - or evening primrose, which glows in a bedroom the atmospheric hue of the gloaming. Skin too hot to be covered or touched, toes outstretched, searching for cool - in air humid and still - feet which long for the damp of midnight grasses in a cold garden.

Behind the bed, Gauguin's brushstrokes are bolder, a stage set scenery created to be viewed from afar - tertiary-hued open flowers and fungi undulate with discordant rhythms, melding with the overheard conversations and tapping of Poe's stately raven, a space between the conscious and subconscious. A scene whose players are abstracted, heard but not seen, bar Pahura, whose in focus gaze diagonally rests on a space she alone can see, and we can only imagine, a space of unrest. 'Nevermore'- the title itself is caught in time, not the ticking hours of a clock, more the beating of a heart.

The painting's gilded frame further adds to a sense of manipulation and misinterpretation within the work, Gauguin's Tahitian paintings were mainly unvalidated in his lifetime, and so the elaborate golden frieze of resplendent abundance feels at odds with the artist's impoverished state while creating the work. His own relationships with his subjects and colonised Tahiti are also fraught with contradictions and controversies.

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) Nevermore, 1897
Oil on canvas, 60.5 × 116 cm The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust).

After Impressionism: Inventing Art - Until 13 August 2023.

The National Gallery Trafalgar Square, London.

Thank you: Neil Evans and Alexandra at The National Gallery.

21. GREGOR SAILER - A SPACE BETWEEN PERCEPTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS.

Gregor Sailer: The Polar Silk Road - The Natural History Museum - LONDON.

Gregor Sailer, EastGRIP, Northeast Greenland Ice Sheet, Ice Core Project, 2019

Listening to The Austrian artist Gregor Sailer speak, is how I imagine, it must have been for The Victorians, who gathered in The Natural History Museum to listen to Adventurers recounting their experiences of discoveries - discussing their evidence to aghast audiences.

There is something romantic about the idea of the lonesome artist who risks his life in the pursuit of documenting uncharted territories, humanless landscapes, exotic and unknown - and then you realise that this work is not an impression, that the chilling reality is that Gregor Sailer is, in fact, an artist reflecting the Now - who dares to speak a truth which is difficult to confront, both for himself and for us. 'My job, as a photographer is to expose... I never wanted to realise a project about climate change, but soon of course, recognised that global warming is the main motor for all these developments around the north pole...I want to cause a discussion, which is going more into the depth of the topic'.

67 exhibited photographs testify to this purpose, evidencing the manmade structures located across four countries in the Arctic Circle. From isolated research centers to Icelandic geothermal power stations - Sailer documents the changes taking place across the Arctic as people increasingly build on and exploit it.

Gregor Sailer, EastGRIP, Northeast Greenland Ice Sheet, Ice Core Project, 2019

The photographer battled on a physical and emotional journey to record the images - working alone in down to minus 55-degree temperatures and waiting at times for hours to capture each frozen moment, often in volatile weather conditions.'I don't have endless materials with me, and on the other hand, it increases my perception, my consciousness.'

The exhibition, presented in mesh-cased igloos is lit with the industrial-style lighting seen in Sailer's scientific photographs.

Gregor Sailer, EastGRIP, Northeast Greenland Ice Sheet, Ice Core Project, 2019

Sailer's use of light is extraordinary, photographing at times in moonlight, the artist's favorite, which provides his portraits with a luminosity that feels solarised. The surreal nature of the land-scape-focused exhibition creates an overarching sense of calm foreboding. 'I am interested in the light of the storm - not the storm'.

Sailer exposes stark photographic evidence that as climate change accelerates, opportunistic political collectives are quick to negotiate new trade routes taking advantage of the changing landscape and providing access to new raw material deposits of natural oil and gas.

The exhibition's title; 'The Polar Silk Road', makes references to the ancient trade networks dated to the second century B.C. which link China, and the Far East with countries in Europe and The Middle East.

'On the one hand, I'm fascinated by these landscapes, I'm very impressed and have lots of respect and, on the other hand, I'm scared because I see what is going on there and what is happening there'. Gregor Sailer.

Gregor Sailer, Port of Kirkees, Barents Sea, Finnmark, Norway, 2021.

Gregor Sailer The Polar Silk Road The Natural History Museum - Until 24 November 2023.

Thank you: Harriet Potter, The Natural History Museum. References: Natural History Museum.

Special Thanks: Xiangyin Tom Gu for the recommendation + research. ​

20. ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE - A SPACE BETWEEN SPONTANEITY AND CONTROL.

A portrait of Lisa Lyon by Robert Mapplethorpe - Phillips auction house - LONDON.

Lot 134, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon 1982. Gelatin silver print, mounted. Signed, dated and numbered 1/10. - Phillips, London.

There is something distinctly fascinating about an auction room, the amassed collection of objects belonging to a previous owner, objects from a life - which once were positioned in a space that was specifically private, and now exposed on a white wall to the general public with a brief description identifying its provenance, held in limbo until a new owner is secured by acquisition.

The late Sam Wagstaff, who died in 1987, the discerning curator of modern art and visionary collector of photography and American silver would surely have been at this sale. The elegant and discreet collector known for his innate instinct for the rare and undiscovered - a visual hunter who would source his art with the completest desire of an addict. His drug of choice may have been image, but the anticipation in the search surely inspired his quest. Piecing his collection of imagery together with a jeweler's eye, Wagstaff would present his discoveries to his partner and protègè Robert Mapplethorpe, a paring that inspired creative exploration aligned to the exacting influences of masterpiece imagery sourced from auction rooms, private sales, and flea markets.

The influence of this collection of works which was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum before his death is dazzling - a self-portrait of someone who sought light in the black and white stills created by others, cross-referencing a dual combination of opposites in the beautifully humble monograph of the jewels in his collection 'A Book of Photographs' published in 1978.

In his foreword to Mapplethorpe's book 'Lady', which includes the many portraits of Lisa Lyon, he writes:'With a new, self-made woman available for all seasons, the shy pornographer has decided to take a series of carom shots off her revised feminity'. This revised femininity presents many alter egos of womanhood, as Bruce Chatwin writes; 'In session after session, Lisa posed as bride, broad, doll, moll, playgirl, beach-girl, bike girl, gym-girl; as frog person, mud-person, flamenco dancer, spiritual medium, archetypal huntress, circus artiste, snake-woman, society woman, young Christian, and kink'.

The portrait of Lisa Lyon by Robert Mapplethorpe was presented in Phillips auction house as part of 'A Private London Collection Like No Other' in May 2023, and immediately stands out as a key example of the artist's unorthodox and iconoclastic style.

The triptych of light panels frames the silhouette of performance artist Lisa Lyon, or so we presume, her veiled appearance concealed from our gaze and yet allowing for her own. That trio of panes neatly frames with religious calm, an ephemeral altarpiece created by the sun - stark and symbolic and devoid of distracting decoration. The silhouetted shadow of this sun Madonna stands to the right, leaving the left frame empty.

Robert Mapplethorpe was known for his love of the night, the nocturnal hours he worked, observed, and documented, leaving the rolls of film for his assistants to print in the morning - a relay routine on repeat. The stark control of his favored electrical light, rarely photographing in sunlight or depicting a portrait sitter twice - and so the folio of Lisa Lyon is a prime example of a new approach, where a relationship of dozens of images of a singular sitter is presented, in differing locations and using natural light.

Lyon veiled is one of the standout pictures from the series and is an important moment as it further pushes the photographer's portraiture to its abstracted best, the composition is pure architecture, mirrored minimalism - and yet immediately communicates that specific Mapplethorpe atmosphere - immediate sexual tension and sophisticated charged simplicity. For an artist known for his extreme sense of control within image and life, the cast shadow in the image is intriguing, reading like a sundial, we are able to identify that the image was taken at a specific time in the late afternoon, the sun is low in the sky, creating the long, intense shadows to fall with intensity. The silhouetted window frames, free from curtains or blinds expose the clean lines of the industrial, and so suggest a warehouse or loft like the Tony Smith-designed high-rise apartments of Mapplethorpe's partner Sam Wagstaff. 

A newly unfolded piece of satin cloth chosen as a veil still rippled with the fine creasing of its dormancy, immediately reminds me of sand dunes embossed with similar rhythmic ripples. The fiber of this veil is hard to decipher, its silken appearance feels habotai luxurious, and yet the creases suggest the cloth being recently unwrapped or unrolled from a tightly wound poll feels specifically synthetic, like a cupro lining used for traditionally masculine tailored garments. In the full published portfolio of images, which this image derives, its twin depicts Lyon in near exact pose, her semi-opaque veiled appearance, however sunlight bright georgette sheer. Arms held out, parallel to her body like a classical dancer, her wrists held out as if suspended by strings. A puppet awaiting manipulation from her master.

Lisa Lyon by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Phillips

​OFIR BERMAN - A SPACE BETWEEN WHAT HAS BEEN AND WHAT IS YET TO COME.

In conversation with the Israel based photographer Ofir Berman.

‘Adi, playing with her friend and covering herself in the sand’. Ofir Berman

When I look at your work I notice that you return to a feeling of domesticity and of​ ​people going about their lives, why are you interested in documenting 'the​ ​everyday'?

I believe that the everyday moments of people can reveal profound insights about a​ ​society, its culture, and its values. These seemingly ordinary moments often hold hidden​ ​narratives, emotions, and stories that can be overlooked or taken for granted. I mean, It​ ​can't be more real and authentic than that.

Many of your published images focus on anticipation - whether individual or​ ​collective there is a real sense of the impending - why are you drawn to that specific​ state?​ ​

The state of anticipation holds a special fascination because that is where all emotions,​ ​possibilities, and narratives converge. Anticipation is a state of transition, a threshold​ ​between what has been and what is yet to come. It carries a sense of curiosity or even​ ​tension because when looking at a picture there is no way of really knowing what is about​ ​to happen or how the story will end, but one can imagine.

‘A Palestinian woman walking through a checkpoint between the West Bank and Jerusalem’. Ofir Berman.

Your style of image varies but there is a specific feeling of calm which is very​ ​pronounced visually within your work as a whole - why are you drawn to an​ ​atmosphere of stillness?

In recent years I started shooting with a medium format analog camera, which also​ ​dictates the way I photograph. For me, using a medium format film camera involves a​ ​more deliberate and calculated process, as it requires careful observation of the scene​ ​before capturing the image. It gives me the opportunity to fully immerse myself in the​ ​scene, noticing intricate details and capturing the essence of the moment.​ ​I feel that there is an intriguing contrast between the calmness and tranquility that the​ ​photos project, compared to the chaotic nature of modern life. Finding moments of​ ​silence, observation, and intimacy are precious or as the saying goes: STILL waters run​ ​deep​ - ​a bit like me.

The community is a central narrative within your imagery, why do you feel you are​ ​drawn back to documenting groups of people?

I believe that our identities and experiences are intertwined with the communities we​ ​belong to. Communities shape our values, traditions, and social interactions, and they​ ​play a significant role in shaping who we are as individuals.

As you can see in my work, I tend to photograph minorities, ethnic communities, and​ ​marginalized individuals or groups, with the intention of using this unique platform that I​ ​have as a photographer, to highlight social issues, support change and contribute to a​ ​more inclusive and equal society.

You have become a consistent voice from Israel with your work - how do you feel​ ​about this and do you feel a responsibility to communicate specific narratives?

When it comes to my work for media and newspapers, as a photographer, I don't always​ ​have control over the specific story that are being covered. This can be sometimes​ ​challenging when it comes to expressing my own creative vision.

Israel is both​ a​ complicated and controversial country, and being born and raised here has​ ​given me a deep understanding, or better say knowledge of the complexities and​ ​nuances of this place where I live. The responsibility I feel as a photographer stems from​ ​this knowledge and connection to the country and its people.

I have access to information​ ​and experiences that others do not have, and this drives me to approach my​ work, especially my personal one, with a sense of integrity, striving to create stories that​ ​convey reality in a more humane, equal, and compassionate way.

‘Women enjoying the last few hours before sunset at the beach. Ofir Berman

Ofir Berman

Ofir Berman is a contributing artist to issue two of M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) Magazine - available now: shop

JAN MELKA - A SPACE BETWEEN SHAPE AND SYMBOL.

The Paris-based artist discusses her evolving point of view.

4/10 (glass series) - 120 x 80cm - acrylic on plexiglass, 2022.

Your focus on the human body is fascinating - can you explain why you return to this reference?

I see the canvas as a blank, shadowy space in which I can project and get rid of any interior feelings I have. It’s easier for me to humanize those feelings on the canvas. The structure of bodies has become more and more abstract in my recent pieces. I became bored by the roundness and felt like deconstructing the shapes. The idea of repetition is still very present, but the movement floats in a new way. I still see human shapes twisting around themselves, but when I take a step back the only body I see is mine.

2/10 (glass series) - 120 x 80cm - acrylic on plexiglass, 2022.

The structure of a house is another reference within your work that you return to - why is this?

I actually see my houses as bodies, interior bodies. When lockdown began in March 2020, during the first weeks of captivity and global horror, I was in the middle of a break-up and a new, secret love affair. The first house was a reaction to how torn up I felt. It was a safe place of protection where I could read my heart and live inside my paintings for the first time.

In fact, the first house was made out of canvases. I literally put together 6 cardboard paintings that were meant to be on the wall. I wanted the paintings to have a role in the space and not just serve as decor.
Then I fell in love with the shape and symbol and began to make more serious houses. They became an obsession and a way of testing materials and colors made with the urge to create in a state of emergency as a kind of shield.

‘Refuge House’ - mixed media, 100 x 120 x 180cm - by Jan Melka and Joseph Melka.

The relationship that you have with your family is very important to you - Your American mother and your French father - how do you feel these different cultures have shaped you?

Having a foreign parent gave me insight for sure. I grew up seeing my mother being treated like a tourist in Paris, an outsider, even though her American-accented French is fine. My father is French, but he had his own issues because he was born in Algeria. His family didn’t move to Paris until he was seven years old. My parents never put any weight on us, but we could still feel questions of identity. It's in our blood and lifestyle. My parents have a special way of seeing the world and they made sure I was aware of my own. I grew up in a very creative little nest and was taught to welcome feelings, to cherish them and speak and create with them.
My brother and I are in love with our parents. They are our favorite people in the world, and we feel so lucky.

I know you love Mexico - can you explain your relationship with this country and why it is important to you?

I first visited Mexico in 2017 for a painting job and didn’t think much of it before I arrived.
Mexico City was a major cultural love shock for me. Above all I appreciated the feeling of surprise. I began large scale painting for the fist time there with no reference to what I had done previously. I became passionate about Mexican culture and pre-Columbian civilizations. This was the first time I felt connected to an energy coming from a particular place. Later on, I found out that my father experienced a similar awakening there when he was about my age. You can see the influence in his art and I probably felt this familiarity there. So Mexico has become a second home. I return each year to paint.

Please can you tell us about the work you are currently undertaking?

Right now I'm focusing on two series of paintings: One is more abstract, I just binge on any movements I can do with my own body. The intention is to explore this bigger persona I have become. It’s less detailed, more like a series of human-sized gestures on canvas.

The other series is more psychological. I use warmer and deeper tones in charcoal and oil. My engagement here is more mental than physical. I’m painting mostly on the floor without a frame and I use a lighter fabric. I like to show these on windows, floating on walls, or in the middle of a space. Transparence and light are important here because they transmit a feeling of life.

These series communicate with each other despite their differences. They respond to each other and I feel very comfortable working on both simultaneously.

Jan Melka photographed by Gemma Janes, Paris.

Jan Melka

Jan Melka will present new work at Colobo’s - 50 Rue Chapon 75003 Paris - 22 June 2023.

MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ - A SPACE BETWEEN EXORCISM AND EXPOSITION.

Every Tangle of Thread and Rope - Tate Modern - LONDON. Photographed by Xiaohui Wu

Image by Xiaohui Wu for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

The tapestry freed from its historic place - off the wall - suspended and allowed to breathe - like a sculpture.

Instalations hang like gothic cathedrals - mummified - discovered awaiting the next life. Once flapping now dormant - asleep - their giant wings shrouded in gravity - the fibrous strands of their being still sensitive to sensation.

A split - a slash in the seams where a giant needle missed - to meet two lips - spill the contents of an outpouring of jute - the noble rope - understood - its diagonal rhythm concealing the genetic secrets of this created species - fashioned from the very fibre of one woman.

Physical threads so thick - the irregular woven surface suggestive of the many hands of the fellowship of community construction - and yet the gargantuan scale and minimalist defiance in its sense of self and oneness -

Image by Xiaohui Wu for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Accompanying sheets of inky charcoal renderings - evidence happenings once volatile now still - indelible and urgent in pigment on paper.
Eye witness depictions made in a state of exorcism to communicate with a traumatised past - reawakened by the instinct of will.

Like a Shaman who communicates tangibly - A bust by an unknown artist from Papua New Guinea displayed in the shadows - a corpse of a semi-decomposed form - a terrifying face to ward off evil - this created object seems to contain the soul of the work. - Deteriorating and yet alive - not with a heart that beats but a rhythm of possession. - It’s Mohicans of tarnished feathers sweltered and oiled with time - the skin ravaged and exposed within it’s protective case - eyes permanently open - unblinking and ringed with lashes so thick as to brush - a being created from materials not of its birth but of its resurrection.

Black lungs - once pink now charred - the vessels and veins of precious life - wretched and exposed in an area only sensed before - behind a smooth skin - now removed - flayed and heaped.

A giant's garments hang by a thread - threatening to snap and engulf the viewer like a fly trap devouring it’s prey. The fearful shadowy interiors of these caves - create glistening imaginings of arachnid eggs awaiting mass hatch.

The suspended situations or 'Abakans' sometimes move slowly - kinetic - awaiting possible volatile unraveling - from silent suspension to a catalan of reverse creation.

Behind a corner - a centuries-old tree severed and bound in metal shackles - as if in an operation theatre - to splint in order to correct - or an alter to sacrifice. It’s metal bed reduced to the essential - the bark skin - dry and dead. - Like a mother - the tree reminds us of a body where life began - sacred and remaining - preserved and yet vandalised through control.

'We live in times which are extraordinary because of their various forms of aggression. Today new danger exists around us as if everyone were against everyone. Agora should become a symbol, a metaphor about the particular historical moment in which we need each other, in which we want to rely on each other more than ever.' Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Magdalena Abakanowicz - 'Every Tangle of Thread and Rope', Tate Modern - Until 21 May 2023.

Thank you Jennifer MacNeill at Tate and Benjamin John Hall for the recommendation.

Images: Xiaohui Wu

AI WEIWEI - A SPACE BETWEEN CONSTRUCTION AND DESTRUCTION.

'Making Sence' - The Design Museum - LONDON. Photographed by Zhonghua Sui.

‘BUBBLE’ 2008 - With this sculpture Ai Weiwei wanted to test the limits of porcelain craftmanship, as this is the largest sphere it is possible to make in porcelain without cracking it in a kiln. Image: Zhonghua Sui for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Pushing through the gallery doors into a vast single room of organisation - like a depot of objects awaiting dispatch. The sense of temporary stillness is exhilarating - part factory, auction room, and part private storage facility - the brutal industrial lighting heightens the sense of a response on pause - pending reaction of a conveyor belt system from the world's factory - eerily without the uniformed army of workers - replaced with a curious public looking for answers but leaving with questions.

‘LEFT RIGHT STUDIO MATERIAL’, 2018. These fragments are the remains of Ai’s porcelain sculptures that were destroyed when his ‘Left Right’ studio in Bejing was demolished by the Chinese state in 2018. Image: Zhonghua Sui for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

A pamphlet in hand used as reference - walls free from text - with neat numbers deciphering each artifact - as if this is not, in fact, an exhibition - more an inventory. And the institutional tension of the presentation is fascinating... allowing an enormity of distance between the work and the context of their creation -  which makes the evidence on show seem more shocking - what is not said speaks louder than what is - the implication - the implicit reads pure to eyes lazy with normalised distractions... Ai Weiwei is not interested in decoration - there is nowhere to hide here, and the exploration of works that exposes found items - which have been repurposed and represented is extraordinary - the remains of an archeological treasure trove all amassed from locations - in plain sight. 

‘UNTITLED (PORCELAIN BALLS)’, 2022 - Cannon balls made during the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) from Xing ware. Image: Zhonghua Sui for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

On entering the space the viewer looks down upon the regimented right-angled arrangements of 5 installations - a visual sensation not unlike touching down or lifting off in an areoplane - gazing down at a view of the world only felt from a certain distance.

‘SPOUTS’ 2015 - 250,000 porcelain spouts from teapots and wine ewers - crafted by hand from the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE). Image: Zhonghua Sui for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

‘UNTITLED (LEGO INCIDENT)’, 2024. ‘Lego is a good metaphor for the speed and repetitiveness of much recent construction in China’. Image: Zhonghua Sui for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

'Fields' of elements or 'scattered fragments' are massed and organised with a precision that immediately communicates the human hand and yet are presented alone creating an overwhelming sense of the micro versus macro - the tip of the melting iceberg. Nothing green grows in these no man’s lands - instead a feast for the grey matter - a harvest of pensive retrospection atmospherically sustains conceptual appetites.

‘STILL LIFE’ - 1993-2000 - Late stone age tools - including axe heads, chisels, knives and spinning wheels. Image: Zhonghua Sui for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) 2023.

Ai Weiwei - image: Rick Pushinsky 2022.

Ai Weiwei - ‘Making Sence’ - The Design Museum - Until 30 July 2023.

Thank you: Jordenne Murray

SEAN SCULLY - A SPACE BETWEEN DUALITY AND DICHOTOMY.

'LANDLINE', Hanover Square - LONDON. Photographed by Tom Gu.

Image by Tom Gu for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN).

The newly unveiled sculpture by Sean Scully in Hanover Square - corners the viewer with an abrupt stillness.

It's linear flatness - not unlike the two-dimensional experience felt when gazing upon a Sean Scully painting - is powerfully life-affirming and arrestingly visual.

The artists' idiosyncratic palette of stripes is immediately recognisable. A style that can be traced back to 1969 when Scully first visited Morocco and saw the patterned fabrics cut into jillabas worn by the hooded locals.
The Scully stripes are rugged yet meticulous and instinctively created - like handmade flags - the stripes of a chosen nation without the flash of stars.

In contrast 'Landline' is glossily polished, its glazed surfaces reflective of the well-healed neighborhood in which it resides.

Camouflaged into its environment and reflecting an ever-changing cityscape and time frame. From the Georgian limestone to industrial red brick and the darkly urban sleek of steel and glass. The delicacy of the trees and omnipresent sky - all reflected back and up from this totem of time.

Image by Tom Gu for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN).

The sculpture's tertiary palette evokes the mystery of the artists' paintings - deepest charcoal flecked with grey - like a residue of another layer beneath - or a whisper of pigment caught up within the brush stroke, rust - like separated oil drops from meat juices that have solidified, verdigre green - leafy fresh - and darkly oxidised - Creamy limestone - warmly seductive and beneficent - and dove grey - feather light - patterned with the faintest chalken trails - as if from a passing aeroplane observed from afar.

The patination within the stone is precise in time and formation - sediments millennia old - not created for aesthetic appeal but from the chemical reaction of extreme pressure. A characteristic of truth selected for its solemn nobility - a surface unseen before - sliced open with unimaginable pre-dynastic Egyptian precision.

The diversity of the materials used within the work - chosen for colour are geographically tethered to the specific global quarries which harvest the earth's DNA - a direct link to the multi-ethnicity of the sculptures location.

The splendor of marble - a material forever connected with prestige, nobility, and strength - the cenotaph, the temple steps, the chic boutiques and hotel foyers of nearby Mayfair - the babies head baptised in the stone font - the carved headstone selected in memorium - a material chosen to begin and end a life - 'Landline’ seems destined to contribute to defining the legacy of an artist - whose work is collected within the most vaulted international museum collections - and yet this work pinpoints directly back to the British capital - the city of the artist's adolescence.

It is impossible to not feel the sober contemplation of another tower, rather taller than this one-story sculpture in the adjacent borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Image by Tom Gu for M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN).

‘Landline’ by Sean Scully RA. Hanover Square, London W1S.

Tom Gu

CALLUM HELCKE - A SPACE BETWEEN SENSE AND SCENT.

M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) meet dancer and future perfumier Callum Helcke. Photographed by Arnan Wang.

March 2023, LONDON.

In the short time I have known you, you strike me as a very driven person - may I ask what drives you forward?

What drives me...I can’t say I know for certain what it is. The things that drive me appear to change from time to time depending on my age, where I am, and who I am surrounded by. Yet there is a consistent theme that runs through the different periods of my life – it is something like a pursuit of meaning.

From a young age, the idea of chasing objective or materialistic goals has never interested me. Yet in my teenage years, I was never able to find a strong passion for any single pursuit – creative or academic – that I resonated with enough to envisage in my future. This led to feeling lost and indifferent - Still, I would always give my all to my endeavours without really knowing why...

During college, a shift in the foundations of my worldview started to take place that began to align my mind to my behaviour. Confused about my future and at a loss for ideas, I began to wonder why I tried so hard at everything, even though I had such little care for the outcomes. Although unconsciously, a sense of lack and a need to please others were there, something deeper appeared to resonate with me when in review. This was the deep sense of alignment I felt when pushing to my limits and trying my best – it didn’t matter what it was I was doing.

I have come to realise that what drives me in life may not be assigned to a specific job or hobby, but rather to the self-discovery that occurs during complete immersion in a craft. My passion in life arises from a curiosity for self and a longing to unveil the unknown, that which is only accessible when I give my all. The choice or direction of my pursuits seems guided by something bigger than me, yet each of the things I pursue seem to provide a question and an answer - about myself or the world.

You speak so passionately about perfume - a world that seems to connect so many sensibilities - can you express why fragrance resonates with you?

Scent lets me think and feel without words.

Growing up with parents who spend a lot of time on their garden, my summer memories are entirely coloured by scent. You could say I had a kind of addiction to smelling flowers when I was child. My sense of the seasons was - and still is - guided by the smell outside my bedroom window when I wake. The absent smell of snow in winter, the invigorating glow of hyacinths in spring, the hazy heat of tarmac in summer and the burnt wood of autumn. When I am captured by scent, there is a space between my thoughts and feelings – even if momentary – that feels more real than real.

A similar space appears to exist with all sensory experiences when one pays deep attention to them, though my affinity lies with the sense of smell. It was only recently however that I realised a link to perfumery. Having worked in the flavour industry during a year placement in my chemistry degree, my interest in perfumery became more tangible as I came to understand the science of the ingredients I was working with. During my spare time on this work placement, I discovered the unique perfumes of companies like ‘Le Labo’ and ‘Maison Margiela’. Fragrances that evoke a memory of summer or capture the essence of a city as opposed to typical masculine/feminine accords. How do the perfumers behind these fragrances make scents that are so intimately nostalgic and familiar, yet so distinct and matchless that they might be from another world?

With fragrance but smell in general, there is a world of chemistry and emotion connecting the body and mind with limitless possibilities. My interests here were foremost scientific due to my background in chemistry, but are now equally not so logical. I sort of wonder if I was to put my mind to this craft, what could I uncover about myself and the world?

You are a very fluent person, with languages - verbal and physical - where and how do you express your freedom?

Freedom for me is something that is felt before it is expressed. If I think about it, I am sure that I was feeling and expressing my freedom before I knew that was what I was doing.

Freedom exists in play and exploration. For me, this was abundant in childhood, but then lost in my school years until I discovered dance. Dance and movement in general offered me a mode of self-exploration that transcended the frameworks of academics and logic, though I didn’t necessarily understand the full extent of this when I started. Initially, I was absorbed in the novelty of learning a new craft but I was limited by a need to amaze or impress rather than explore. Maybe this is a consequence of the binary win/lose structure that we become so familiar with at school. It took me some time to learn that you truly can’t win or lose in creative exploration. Can a child win or lose whilst playing? The question is misplaced.

I initially trained as a hip-hop dancer in London but later began exploring movement in general. At first, I trained in teams that performed in showcases and competitions. This is very different to recently where training has become a very personal task - used to self-assess and review - internally mapping my feelings in response to movement. Ironically, performing to crowds may seem like expression, though the way I use movement now feels truer and freer than ever before.

Maybe the biggest turning point in my perspective on expression came during my year off after college where I began learning from Dominic Lawrence. Dom teaches movement as opposed to ‘dance’. In his classes, he cultures a perspective of compassion for oneself, and you feel a kind of spaciousness when exploring with him. This view was new and refreshing and expanded my perspective of dance to a form of meditation and self-discovery.

In every action, choice, or movement, I have learned that there exists the opportunity to step back, observe and create space. With this opens a range of new dimensions and possibilities that were once missed. Here I feel lies a truer sense of freedom which is felt internally and expressed genuinely. When I give myself to this process fully, I feel as free as a child.

During the pandemic, you worked at a pharmacy - this must have been a very challenging experience during such an unprecedented time - what did you glean from this period?

The pandemic was a strange time. My choice to work at my local pharmacy was initially a selfish one – I wanted work experience as my CV was looking a bit empty - though over my time working there, I became acutely aware of the suffering that people were experiencing, and I felt a sense of duty to my colleagues and the patients.

Before university, I went through a period where I wanted to become a doctor, so I had some knowledge of medicine and drugs that I was able to bring to the job. Initially, I thought the job would be mostly technical – i.e. drug dispensing – but due to the high pressure on our services from the lack of GP appointments, much of my time was spent facing patients.

Looking back, at some points my time at the pharmacy felt like a normal job, but at others, the pressure felt very real. However, what amazed me here was the determination of the pharmacist and his core staff - against the odds - to continue providing the best service possible for patients. The pharmacist knew all the patients by name and would always call to inform them about their prescriptions. Staff at the pharmacy would provide informal consultations where possible to patients who were unable to get GP appointments. In response, patients would treat us like family friends, sometimes bringing cake or home-grown vegetables as a thank you for our services. I came to appreciate the unconditional dedication and service provided by the team at the pharmacy. There are so many individuals out there who go unacknowledged and yet never stop giving. I get the sense that we must cherish these people when we meet them.

In such a difficult time, maybe the thing that shaped me the most was this - despite the extent to which people were suffering, they still had the grit to continue pushing on. Patients struck by terminal illnesses, unable to see family and friends were still pushing on. Partners of those bedridden and in constant pain were providing the best possible care and still pushing on. It made me think - there is always someone out there who is worse off than you, who is also working harder than you. This period ignited a renewed desire to push myself and I became more disciplined than ever before.

You have a strong appreciation for the concept of MA, how did you find out about it and how do you engage with it within your life?

I think I came to experience MA before I knew about it as a concept. Maybe the first time I was exposed to it was when reading ‘Snow Country’ by the Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata. In the opening chapter, the protagonist rides a train into the ‘snow country’ and notices a girl in his carriage through her reflection in the window. He watches intimately as her face dissolves into the stars and mountain-scape beyond. When I first read this scene, I remember pondering the space between each of the objects here – physical and emotional – and how the space is relational rather than empty.

The Japanese ability to highlight that which we normally miss never fails to amaze me. I have always been enamoured by experiences and feelings that are inconclusive and multi-layered. Like novels that ask you to decide how they ended, songs with so much ambience they make you want to cry, or fragrances that take you back to a memory that you don’t have. In all these there is something that feels off-centre, maybe even slightly unsatisfying and I wonder if that space between what we expect and what is could be described as MA.

I am not sure if one definition can completely capture MA – in ikebana, it relates to the space between flowers in an arrangement, in karate, it relates to the safe distance between two opponents, in a painting, it describes the blank space between the artists depictions. To me, these instances make me ask: where is the line between what we define as one thing and what we don’t. The space between is a living relationship and the physical lines drawn sometimes may be illusory.

When applied to my day-to-day life, MA makes me wonder about the gaps that occur in my subjective experience. For example, what lies in the space between thoughts? What about the space between a sensation and its recognition. A view of these smaller things gives me an infinite sense of wonder, for both the world and the body from which experience arises. My common thinking mind can become so caught up in goals or problem solving that the true nature of the subjective experience is missed. MA appears fundamentally a part of experience and our perception, and when I experience it, it spreads all throughout my mind and body in a pervasive calm.

Callum Helcke

Photographed by Arnan Wang Art Direction M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN)

RAINA SEUNG EUN JUNG - A SPACE BETWEEN MOMENT AND MEMORY.

​M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) meet emergent artist ​Raina Seung Eun Jung - LONDON.

One of the most enriching parts of my job as a teacher is that I get to meet different people at a very particular stage in their lives and see work that is sometimes made in line with who they are, not just who they want to be or who they feel they should be. In the space of a tutorial - that work is sometimes confirmed - it becomes clear as to how somebody thinks... they can hear their own voice back - sometimes for the first time - and If you are really fortunate - you witness the rarest of moments - when they join the dots for themselves...

M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) has a commitment to instinct always - and the uniting of voices from different spaces is central to our appreciation of MA - a space that often remains undetectable in a media beyond a sharp intake of breath.

When asked how I choose the works for the magazine I always reply with the same answer: It must make my heart beat faster.

I first saw some drawings taped to a wall of an empty studio by Raina Seung Eun Jung, oil pastel grazed over thick cartridge paper to form impressions of spaces, interior spaces - that had a specific atmosphere - a fleeting tension that immediately drew me in...

City Kids, 2021 - gouache on silk.

Please describe​ the​ process behind your work​​?​

I investigate the coexistence of heterogeneous things while pursuing what I wanted to record. I grew up in Seoul with the uneasy coexistence of traditional Korean culture and my generation’s globalised multicultural outlook. Currently, my expanded painting practice seeks to break the boundaries of medium and homogenised versions of culture by offering the viewer the essence of the moment as a form of memory and creating the space for both of us to exist fully.

I want to know how my knowledge of traditional painting techniques can be applied to record contemporary digitised life. I feel most comfortable using painting to communicate my ideas and trying to reach someone who needs to hear from me. I will keep developing my technical and conceptual competence and push the boundaries of my work as an artist and curator, questioning the reason for my existence and communicating while finding a reason to live.

You​r​ work has such an immersive quality, both in terms of subject and scale - ​wh​en​ did you realise that you needed to create works of this nature? 

I think I am writing a book called my life through my paintings. I keep writing a book that doesn't know when it will end. I capture my reality, just like shooting scenes from scenarios. As with movies, in the process of filming each scene, you can plan how the movie will be edited and what the result will be, but it is difficult to predict perfectly. Rather than being difficult and obsessed with perfection, the thrill of discovering the unexpected picture is more attractive. Some of my paintings, too, are planned, drawn, structured, and focused on telling a specific story. But when I trust the process and let it flow, it becomes more powerful when I discover unexpected combinations. The scale of the work is determined by the moment I think of the scene. I have this certain voice saying, “This scene should be this size.” based on the vibration and influence of the moment. I make this decision because I want to convey the scene I experienced realistically to the audience. Because I want to show what I see and feel. That kind of mind seems to help give a sense of immersion. I try to communicate by showing the world I see.

Safety greens, 2021 - oil on canvas.

Your use of colour is very specific, can you explain why you are drawn to such palettes? 

Colour acts as a language to explain my deep inner feelings. So, the colours in my paintings are not simply for the description of the subject. My emotions exist even at the moment I am drawing, and emotions exist in the scene that I am drawing, so the overlap of emotions from various timelines is captured in colour. The emotions I experienced in that scene and the emotions I experience in the process of painting over time arenexpressed in my own specific colours. For me, colour was the first place where I could be free. Growing up in Korean society, I was able to get closer to myself after finding a way to express my emotions through colour during my growing-up days when I was used to hiding my emotions.

You seem to be drawn to fleeting moments within your work which are very specific and yet have a particular informality to them as well - how do you decide upon what you will paint?

For me, the small things matter. It's because I believe that small, extremely mundane moments built my reality. So I stop and look. Pause for a while and observe those small moments fully, and draw a scent that remains strong. The moment you fully look at and draw creates more value than is left only as a memory. I hope that the small reason I will live tomorrow will also reach the audience as a vibration.

Where you at, 2021 - oil on canvas.

The layering of imagery within your work is fascinating - it feels some how digital and yet you apply physical paint, physical layers - what keeps you returning to this process?

The expression of my emotions through the colours I mentioned earlier is the basis for the layering process. It is the unconscious basis of the scene that I painting. Maybe it is my inner state that I do not want to be found out, and it probably started with a desire for someone to know. In this way, layers work to capture the elements that make up the scene one by one, such as my condition, my point of view, physical, and psychological, the existence of the other person, and the surrounding environment. Of course, painting is two-dimensional, but objects and scenes exist in more than two dimensions, so in the process of capturing that energy, I choose layering. This is because I intuitively believe in the power and space of things that exist in the invisible, and that we only see when we look closely.

Siesta with Maart, 2021 - oil on paper.

Raina Seung Eun Jung

JULIAN OPIE - A SPACE BETWEEN 2D AND 5G.

‘Bastide. 2 2022’, Lisson Gallery - LONDON Photographed by Arnan Wang.

Julian Opie - Bastide. 2 2022. Auto paint on aluminium and steel.

Through the gallery glass, 'Bastide. 2 2022', appears like a vinyl sticker - applied to a physical landscape, sharpie black against the bright paper white courtyard walls and the bustling life of an urban concrete, brick, and glass landscape behind.

Only the trees feel real in this surrealist set - bare branches amputated, fingerless limbs - ready to sprout a new - a skeletal town below forms a silhouette of a humanless space, unnervingly near and yet not life-size - A shell - reminding us of uncomfortable truths of news-flash realities of war-torn communities, fled and fired.

The window frames of adjacent buildings - black-mirroring the imagined town - throw the viewer into more confusion - what is real and what is illusion? Trompe-l'œil reality state - a de Chirico echo - A 'sham' construct - created to be viewed from afar - a stage set whose players may be unaware that 'all that glitters is not gold. 

Julian Opie - Bastide. 2 2022. Auto paint on aluminium and steel.

The blocked doors and windows of the sculpture - symbolic touchstones permanently outlined - a cross - a flower - a bell - a faceless clock - forever out of time. Traced and repeated so many times that the details are gone, but the outlines remain. The walls are transparent to expose a no-mans-land - like a prison cell - or the charred remains of a burnt building. 

Julian Opie - Bastide. 2 2022. Auto paint on aluminium and steel.

From inside, I imagined this playground with sharp edges - as being cast in bitter chocolate - brittle and easy to snap - temptingly meltable - into mirrored pools of gloss - but in fact, the work is created from cool aluminum and steel, coated in perfectly mechanised auto paint. - My mind flashes to Jackson Pollock and his use of alkyd enamel paints - chosen for their satisfyingly spash-able immediacy maybe - but Opie's paint choice is more distant, less human somehow, and altogether slower - which seems to contrast with the immediacy of his appeal conceptually.

Figure 4, position 8. 2022, Figure 3, position 2. 2022, Figure 2, position 4. 2022 - Polished stainless steel.

Flaty monotone graphics - like a series of logos - the buy now immediacy of the takeaway coffee cup - the fast food burger wrapper - but what is Julian Opie wrapping? - his contents is concept, food for thought - food without a face. A trio of faceless characters recline and stretch with no sense of time - the viewer joining the dots for themselves - like a Lichtenstein without the speech bubbles - his work today offers an instant fix for the 5G cravings of an excited youthful audience - but Opie’s offering arrived long before social media or the internet.

In 3D real - the sculptures seen at London’s Lisson gallery are seductive for their scale and satisfying translation to their 2D relatives.

Julian Opie - OP.VR@LISSON/London Lisson Gallery 27 Bell Street, London. Until 15 April 2023. Images by Arnan Wang

JOSEF ALBERS - A SPACE BETWEEN THE GLOAMING AND THE NIGHT.

Paintings Titled Variants - David Zwirner - LONDON.

Josef Albers, Variant/Adobe, 1947. Oil on blotting paper. Image courtesy of David Zwirner.

Cool Bauhaus values meet the heat of an arid mid-century Mexico in a series of paintings - seemingly of abstracted landscapes - but in fact, could be seen as self-portraits. Reflected in the soft human touch of Josef Albers's calculated formula for life and art. Part tender poet and part uncompromising Geometrist - his line dissects and exposes an X-ray of what lies beneath.

A democratic appreciation of a single-story residence - a home - a safe space - whose symbolism is human and immediate - protective and peaceful - two windows, a single entrance, a flat roof. An educator on vacation - looking for a sanctuary from the repetition of timetabled terms and an evacuated past left behind in occupied Europe. The blacked-out doorways and windows stare back at the viewer blankly - the deep shadows mysterious - holding our gaze with cold intensity - both inviting from the beating heat and yet unnerving to trespass into territory more emotional than elemental. 

Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Patzcuaro, Mexico, 1935-36. Photo negative. ©2023 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York/DACS, London. Image courtesy of David Zwirner.

The minimalism of a single maze-like diagrammatic drawing - rendered with a rule - on finely gridded paper - bowing in its light wooden frame - as if still tacked to a studio wall reminds us of the theorist and educator in Albers - whose working renderings are like a mathematician’s calculations and by no means the conclusion.

Josef Albers, Study for Graphic Tectonics, c. 1942. Ink on paper. Image courtesy of David Zwirner.

Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Monte Albán, Mexico, 1939. Gelatin silver print. ©2023 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York/DACS, London. Image courtesy of David Zwirner.

The texture of the canvas is presented raw and rugged beneath the paint layers, a latticework of tiny interwoven threads quietly supporting a career of surfaces, celebrated for their dazzling brilliance and showmanship of survival. The quiet relationship of Herr and Frau Albers is very present within this exhibition - Anni Albers, the now celebrated master weaver, who quietly supported her famous husband throughout his career is seen momentarily in the tiny evidential source material, intricately indexed and presented alongside the masterworks within the exhibition.

Josef Albers' delight as a colourist is exceptional to witness in the flesh, the works seem to testify to the impossible beauty of the natural - each image another time of day, from the optimism of dawn to the acidity of noon, to the heartbreak of the gloaming to the dying embers of night.

Josef Albers, N.M. Black-Pink, 1947. Oil on Masonite. Image courtesy of David Zwirner.

A new dawn - a peaceful democracy presides within these gallery walls - where colour-drenched science is maintained in a meditation of visual poems - where the rhythmic restless sun - whose shadows fall like momentary reminders that time waits for no one - telling us to witness and enjoy the present, eyes open in wonderment - because who can say if that colour combination or day will ever be repeated.

Josef Albers, Paintings Titled Variants. David Zwirner, 24 Grafton Street, London - until 15 April, 2023.

Special Thanks: Sara Chan at David Zwirner London.

FLO RAY - A SPACE BETWEEN THE INTERNAL AND THE EXTERNAL.

M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) meet emergent artist Flo Ray - LONDON.

Please describe the installation that was presented at The Royal College of Art degree show in July 2022.

I made a series of new sculptures for the show that came together to form a larger work called The Movement. It’s comprised of variously anthropomorphic hanging objects that recall punch bags and/or a gathering of bodies. They’re all made from different materials, ranging from the faux-leather used in boxing equipment, to new and used clothing, and they’re held together by a variety of conjunctions – zips, string, cable ties, pins, tape. Both the objects and their surfaces invoke past and impending violence; they’re suspended quietly in space as though waiting for the next blow, their seams unpicked, restitched, and outward-facing. They each carry some kind of signifier, too – a clothing label, key, price tag, ID card, or similar – objects inferring a series of ‘elsewheres’; invisible systems, places, or people not present.

Because they approximate human dimensions, to be among the sculptures feels akin to being in a crowd. A key aspect in the conception of this project was the intention for it to be walked through and navigated by visitors; experienced from within, rather than gazed upon from a distance. This wasn’t able to be fully realised due to space restrictions, so the show was a small selection of a much wider body of work. But I wanted to think about types of action that transform uses of space by shifting perceptions of selfhood from the individual to the power of the collective body. What happens in that shift, and how is it felt? What’s lost and gained? We’re often taught to think of space as merely a container for everything in it, but this isn’t what happens on a social, architectural, or even physical level, among particles. The body and the space it occupies are relationally bound; they actively and mutually create one another. This understanding dissolves the distinction between them, and I’m constantly bowled over by it. By making non-linear passages of movement and thought possible through the work, I hoped that such a dynamic would implicate visitors as participants, rather than viewers.

I started making the work in March 2022, and I was responding directly to the intensified conditions that bodies in public spaces had been subjected to over the preceding couple of years: on one hand, the wide berths and rising suspicion normalised at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic; and on the other, bodies united in close proximity, filling streets in the name of Black life, trans rights, a free Palestine, and climate justice, among other things. In the UK, strikes and marches by staff at dozens of universities were also taking place – including at the RCA. All of these struggles are ongoing, but the polarised attitudes and behaviours towards public space were extremely pronounced from 2020-22, and that’s what I wanted to address. It all came to feel increasingly urgent just a few months later, when the government’s ‘anti-protest’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill was introduced.

One thing that really surprised me was how some people responded to the work. I had wondered if it might be perceived as vaguely threatening, given the wall of bodies it appeared as from afar, rather than a walk-through environment. It was the first physical show at the RCA in three years, and of course there was still some anxiety around opening to the public. But despite all the lockdowns and the isolation – or in spite of them, perhaps – a number of people were going up to the sculptures and holding onto them. I mean actually hugging them, and some for quite a while! What’s surprising when encountering the work, I think, is that the objects are not heavy at all; they’re light on their feet, so to speak. They’re in constant motion, responsive to touch, to other bodies moving through, with, among them. I’d expected some people might want to punch them, but not physically embrace them. Without wanting to romanticise that, I did find it quite moving (one iteration of the title I hadn’t accounted for); sensing in those gestures a form of hope that’s synonymous with solidarity – or at least a feeling of connectedness.

I was fascinated by the bag which was resting on the floor in the installation, the tension between these objects which hung like meat in an abattoir and yet suggest life at the same time - the prospect of the fight and the stamina needed within training. As an artist, what are you searching for within your work?

Yes, there are definitely multiple antagonisms at play. I’m glad you felt there was also a life force in the work. That’s crucial, I think – the potential for continuance, change, momentum.

I tend to think of the bag resting on the floor as failing or refusing to perform a given role. Because it’s not quite suspended, but it’s not fully weight-bearing, either; it’s only just touching the ground, and you can’t really tell that from afar. Maybe it’s doing just enough to pass. Maybe it’s exhausted. Or maybe it’s unable to perform the role expected of it. All bodies suffer in service to capitalism’s fallacy of exponential growth, while some are actively disabled by it. Perhaps all the bags are failing and refusing in their own ways. Even the red thread that runs through them is excessive, knotted, and complicated, like the labour that marginalised bodies are forced to perform in the very act of survival. But, as you say, they do also suggest life. For me, this is found in their difference and the proximity between them; in their ability to simultaneously create and occupy space. There’s transformative potential in that – whether it’s a picket line, a protest, a party... or simply a gathering of materials.

It’s moments and possibilities like these that I’m looking for, or hoping to create, in my work. It’s all part of envisaging new ways of relating. How might connections occur differently, without the usual power dynamics and modes of exploitation? How does one thing sit next to another – be they words, materials, sounds, images, or living beings – and what is created in the spaces between them? Do they collide, spark, change each other? What other configurations are possible?

For all the modes of collectivity imaginable, our vocabulary is wildly insufficient. For example, ‘community’ is often romanticised, even fetishised, and rarely talked about as violent or manipulative, which it can also be. The word implies so much more, whereas ‘friend’ often doesn’t imply enough. It’s stretched so far and so thinly to cover a wide range of relations, almost diluting the potency and radical kinds of love that friendship can entail. These words and categories have always felt somewhat elusive to me; non-specific and coded, often operating via unspoken rules, with invisible boundaries and unacknowledged hierarchies. I guess I’m trying to get at the nuances of these, to do away with the idea that solitude and togetherness somehow exist in opposition to one another. It’s ultimately a reimagining of space, because it does away with the myth of the internal and the external. It does away with the very idea of opposition, because none of these things are binary.

The materials that you engage with and use within your work are very specific - please can you explain the process behind these choices?

There are always multiple factors that determine how I work, and what with. Most obviously these have to do with time, space, and money, so choice is often limited from the start. I rented a little studio in New Cross for a few years – a long time ago now, back when it was slightly more affordable to do so – and I taught myself how to pour concrete, how to sew on an old Singer that someone had given me, how to work with various other tools. Like many artist’s studios, they were then bulldozed and replaced with ‘luxury’ apartments, so that was followed by a period where my one-bed flat had to suffice. I threw myself into reading a lot more, and started to write with more intent. I also started drawing more, which I’d stopped doing for a number of years. Later, I had access to an old football club which meant I could work on a larger scale again. These days I mainly have desk space, so I’m working more with film and audio. But writing and drawing continue to be the two constants, and they’re often starting points for everything else.

At the same time, the medium I work in is specific to whatever set of concerns I’m dealing with. I couldn’t have made The Movement as a film, for instance, because with film you’re bound by linearity; there’s a beginning and an end. That work needed to be open and embodied. Equally, I’m working on a film at the moment which couldn’t be a set of sentences or photographs, because it’s so much about the rhythms, overlaps, and transitions between voice and imagery.

Regardless of my circumstances, I will continue to be materially promiscuous. I’m not interested in mastery, and I’ve become increasingly suspicious of the need for control. There needs to be room in the making for mistakes and surprises, because those are often very generative; they allow for connections and experiences that aren’t predetermined. In a way, I don’t see all these materials or disciplines as separate. Of course they all come with their own histories; those are important, and sometimes they’re also what I’m responding to. But there isn’t a huge difference in how I approach composition – whether it’s linguistic, material, emotional, or digital. I’ll punctuate space or sound the way I might a piece of writing.

You engage with and return to layering and collage within your practice - please can you explain your process and why you choose this media?

Again, it’s very much to do with relations and transitions between parts, and not in any metaphorical sense. Or... never solely in a metaphorical sense. Sometimes it manifests as collage, where parts clash, bleed into, and disrupt one another, creating all sorts of tangents and productive distractions. Much of life is experienced in exactly this way – as fragmentary, discontinuous. This is intensified by the onslaught of sensory stimuli that we’re consistently subjected to.

Often, though, I tend to view my use of parts as being closer to metonymy, which preserves context and allows difference between parts to remain unchanged. This is a way of acknowledging that everything is already multiply referential and heavily contextual. It makes some of the groupings in my work feel more like paratactic arrangements, which can exist without merging and without hierarchy.

Working in these ways resists the coherent, singular narrative, and honours multiplicity; especially where contradiction is involved, and it usually is. There’s a lot of disorientation regarding subjectivity in my work; particularly in my writing, which focuses on junctures between selves and parts of selves. I’m interested in how we exist in relation to one another, but, crucially, how we can exist outside of that formula, too.

What are you working on at this time?

I’m about to finish a short film called No Internal Thing, which is a pandemonium of what’s usually referred to as inner speech, but without the accepted distinction between internal and external. It’s a dynamic landscape of sound and imagery jammed together in an attempt to explore the panoply of voices that occupy a single head.

After that, I’ll move onto editing another film that’s been shelved for a long time. It involves a number of actors, and we started filming it before the pandemic hit, then obviously had to stop for a while. So I lost the momentum with that, but finally managed to finish the filming last year. It’s also about language of a certain kind; it’s called Recital, though there’s no speech. It’s more concerned with the performative dynamics of speech – repertoires of adopted gesture, and non-verbal communication. The film will examine the roles these play in the production of self, and how they intersect with gender. Broadly speaking, it’s a montage of headshots involving some fairly dubious examinations of the mouth.

Flo Ray

Photography by Lucio Martus

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD - A SPACE BETWEEN ORDER AND HIERARCHY.

INFINATE FOLDS - Serpentine, LONDON. Photographed by Arnan Wang.

Confessions for Myself, 1972 - Black patina’d bronze and wool.

Malcolm X #20, 2017 - Polished bronze with black patina, wool, polished cotton and synthetic fibres and silk with steel support.

Braided organ pipes - re-tuned - to play an ancient future.

Ridged and runkeled metallic obsidian - raw prayers of ceremonial offerings

Synesthesia

The dignity of leaves - a ceremony to celebrate the forever fleeting - bronze bloomed with time.

Walking Angel, 1962 - Bronze.

Tender steps on delicate tread - patiently maternal -

Thorax perforated - winged lotus - a hand-cupped god of a dynasty long past.

Remembered in wet teal clumps of piled organs - heaped internal hot on the cold - an abandoned procedure - unfurling yet still beating - trapped between plates of rippled metal.

Bathers, 1967 - Aluminium and silk.

Time womb - aluminium silk - silk aluminium - a seat belt - cut - left to sway - pendulum and shadowing a trinity of stripe.

Giant knots - like hair - pulled back to prevent interruption.

A fountain of movement - mechanical and unrelenting -

A row of Gods - Luxor luxuriates - a drip of rust coral - the damn held for now -

Zanzibar, 1974-75 - Polished bronze with black patina, silk, wool and synthetic fibres with steel support.

Mouthwatering primal carnal - thickly Heavy Roman Catholic knots - tied - untied with exhausted abandon -

Uncontrollable red - gushing - with every heartbeat - behind a locked door.

Numero Rouge, 2021 - Bronze with red patina, silk, wool and synsthetic fibres with steel support.

The inner sanctum - hushed private - dignity dulled - in preparation for the next life.

The gold-rich and fervent - bodily mirrored ancient composure

Wood base - preserved

Brickwork rhythmic repetition in heavy metal - suffocates a tiny bed - for a bambino king.

Cleopatra’s Wedding Dress, 2003 - Multicoloured cast bronze plaques and silk on wood base.

Josephine - A generous grip of scarlet ropes - a mechanical arm outreached in a gesture of remembrance.

La Musica Josephine Red/Black, 2021 - Black patina bronze with red cord.

Barbara Chase-Ribound: Infinite Folds

Serpentine North Gallery - Until 10 April 2023.

Photographs: Arnan Wang

XIANGYIN TOM GU - A SPACE BETWEEN THE CORNER AND THE CORNER.

M-A (A SPACE BETWEEN) meet emergent artist Xiangyin Tom Gu, LONDON.

‘Entangled Past’ by Xiangyin Tom Gu 2022. Image: Xiangyin Tom Gu

‘Have you read much Yukio Mishima?’ Xiangyin Tom Gu asks while reaching for a copy of ‘The Sound of Waves’ from the cloth-covered shelves of ‘Hatchards of Piccadilly - ‘the translation in English loses little of the power of the original.’

Tom Gu is an elegant bespectacled gentleman, born to another age, whose fluency in language - both spoken and visual is impressive. Eyes that dart and focus on the horizon while he rhythmically crafts his hypotheses - from a flow of cross-referenced texts, theories, and exhibitions. I realise quickly that I am listening to the audacious soul of an artist.

Currently studying for a masters in psychology after graduating from The Royal College of Art in 2022 - choosing photography as a medium to explore trauma in an installation titled ‘Entangled Past’. An imposing layering of printed Japanese papers - dominated the end-of-year show at the art school’s freshly built Herzog & de Mourn designed Battersea building.

A box of photographs were found in Tom Gu’s grandfather’s attic, ‘in the corner of the corner’. Image: Xiangyin Tom Gu

Please describe your graduation installation ‘Entangled Past’?

My graduation installation 'Entangled Past' showcased a triptych of an old archival image from my own family, in which my grandfather was standing before the Tiananmen Square supporting the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The triptych consists of three large pieces of prints, each sized 1.2 by 2.4 meters, intending to create an immersive space for the audience. The image came from a poorly preserved 5x7 black and white negative with clear traits of mold and stains. The anterior future, which one may call fate, laid in front of the protagonists in the image. Not to mention how contentious those times were in today's perspective, the elderly like my grandfather who went through the revolution refrained from bringing it up as a topic until their death. Drifting between memory and fantasy, photographs of the political events now serve as the mise-en-scène for us to travel through time and space.

The relationship with your grandfather is fascinating - in life and afterlife - please can you discuss his influence on your work?

My grandfather was the most important figure in my own family, both his presence during his lifetime and his absence after his passing played a significant role in my own growth. Before he died of pancreatic cancer, ironically, he mostly kept reticent concerning his own feelings and we rarely had much conversation. Yet afterwards, when my family was organising his heritage, a large number of old images were rediscovered. It is through careful reading of these archives that I came to know him in a non-verbal manner. Such abstract conversations which took place after death separated the living and the dead proved to be extremely deep and open. Thus, from then on, I put much emphasis on archival materials.

The wish to have serious conversations with the prominent figure within the family, in this case my grandfather, was never fulfilled. Such regret became the primary reason for my giving up on pharmaceutical science and pursuing fine art photography. Yet the division between life and death made the process of such wish-fulfilling a never ending dream through the reminiscence of photography.

There are many symbolic elements within your practice - including the ocean - please can you discuss some in detail?

The element of the ocean is for me the most important in this whole installation space. The ocean represents the fluid and the omnipresent. I wanted to express a sense of futility by fragmenting the frame of the ocean into hundreds of tiny segments. The nature that is also hinted at by this universal symbol then constantly reminds me of a piece written by Louise Glück in 'March':

‘Nothing can be forced to live.

The earth is like a drug now, like a voice from far away,

a lover or master. In the end, you do what the voice tells you.

It says forget, you forget.

It says begin again, you begin again.’

I deployed the ocean as an opportunity to blur the political aura given by the triptych work. Hence, in some respects, my space is also about conflicts and balance between polarised elements clashing together. The battleground between these seemingly unrelated elements is in the middle where the audience are standing, the gap, the grey area or the conflicted zone.

Roland Barthes ‘The Death of the Author’ is a reference point - what is your response to this critical essay and how has it influenced your thinking?

During the exhibiting process of ‘Fragmented Ocean’, I made the decision to allow the audience to bring with them back home one piece of the hundred fragments hanging in the air. Each piece was an individual segment which together with the others could form a whole oceanic frame shot with my camera. Through this act, the presentation of the installation thus constantly reformed and changed into various shapes and resulted in different chemistry within the space, along with the other work 'Entangled Past'.

Gradually, as a natural selection unfolds, the triptych behind the ocean installation was unveiled yet the fragments of the ocean slowly disappeared. This, for me, represents an analogy with how memory works. There is only a facade of being in control for the protagonist, in reality all perceptions remain in the end subjective. The way Roland Barthes inspired me through 'The Death of the Author' is manifested in here how I willingly gave up all authority as to how one should interpret or understand the piece. Between the author and the audience there exists a gap, namely 間 (ma), and it is more than enough to be with my audience together in this gap of limbo.

Time as a concept seems to be important to the work as a whole, can you describe how time has effected the creation and curation of the installation?

Back in 1966, when the great cultural revolution broke out and the relationship between the USSR and China froze, my grandfather was 25 years old. Today, as the artist standing in front of the life-size triptych portrait piece, I am 25 years old. The event occurred 57 years ago, which is exactly the age difference between me and my grandfather. There clearly is a sense of reminiscence and melancholy. Such striking coincidence lured me further to imaginatively impersonate and blend into the mise-en-scène.

Layers of time also could unfold in terms of the anterior nature of documentary photography. The unfortunate ignorance of our own fate which deeply cursed all us human beings could also be indicated by these harmless images. To look back on the photographs which could signify key moments in history, from this point of view, is another gesture of ironic salute towards time and space.

Xiangyin Tom Gu

Tom Gu will present work as part of Hot Sheet 2023.

14 April 2023: 18:00 – 21:00 BST - 248 Ferndale Road London SW9 8FR

Event brigt Link:

COMME des GARÇONS - A SPACE BETWEEN INTELLECTUAL AND PROPERTY.

A constellation of dreams at Dover Street Market, LONDON.

“A moment after the fairy’s entrance the window was blown open by the breathing of the little stars, and Peter dropped in.” Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, 1911.

Puppetry in time with no strings attracted? - Trust blind acceptance - the exposure of ‘in plain sight' - Clown - Mime - Jester - Joker - Entertainer - Puck.



A slow unraveling, quiet volatility, resistant surrender - a breaking down - to reveal the internal within the traditionally tailored and concealed - raw wounds - inflicted or enforced? Yet never accidental - exposed, and ready to be frayed.



A silhouette rooted in the intimate, the nape of the neck, a neat shoulder, exposed wrists - a volume over hip - lost boyhood - the happy daze of daydream distractions - to resurface with a melancholy realisation of the present tense. J.M Barrie’s open window, Pablo’s blue period - peopled with the chalken tender - 
Wolfgang Amadeus tailcoats and baroque audacity - of an upside down reworking of a melody - replayed until satisfied - a shrill cascade of laughter - a pause of pleasure.



The granular miso-micro glitter sequins embedded into fine wool suitings - like flecks of the subconscious resisting the consumption of the darkness… or are they stars in a pollution-free sky? I’ll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams.



Kawakubo timing is so precise - digital tight - sundial uncompromising - time-delay felt in response to everything else seen after - everything else is everything else.



The considered offering of 5 white shirts - seemingly similar cut from the same poplin cloth - but character different - who else would offer such a series when one will do? A sure sign that CDG dance to the rhythm of their own drum - an internal beat of clarity - an external opportunity. A certain enthusiastic cruelty that you cannot own all five - the wearer tested to decide - to react in instinct - where to wear - gaining speed to clothing the within.



And of course, there are those who respond with the immediacy of disdain - possibly objecting to the seemingly ostentatious - but that is also part of this Caucus race - removing the sense of selecting for the gaze of another.

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.” Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, 1911.

Comme des Garçons Homme Plus - Dover Street Market, 18-22 Haymarket, London SW1Y 4DG

DSM

Image: Spring Summer 2023. doverstreetmarket.com

Special Thanks: Mo Nan

CÉZANNE - A SPACE BETWEEN FATHER AND SUN.

A view of ‘a once in a generation’ retrospective show at Tate Modern LONDON.

‘Portrait of the Artist’s Son’ by Paul Cézanne, 1880, oil on canvas.

My eye was drawn to a few pictures within this exhibition - a feat in fact - when such a dazzling showing of images (80) feels overwhelming to behold - in fact someone fainted whilst I was there… unsurprising when seeing such beauty squared in the real.

Apparently, the signal in life to knowing your calling is through the passions you feel - and there are signals which patiently repeat within this exhibition - passions revisited - of landscapes where you can sense the breeze billow through your clothes, the sun warm upon your skin with that particular surprise that is experienced when summer arrives.

The artist’s popularity was not experienced early in his career and it is a testament to his instincts and will to have continued within a style that he quietly fostered.

It would be easier to surrender to the satisfaction to gaze upon Cézanne's work in pure wonderment, the prettiness of the views, and imagine just how sweet those fruits would taste, warm and heavy with juice from a studio table. My fellow viewing public was caught up in the nostalgia, I overhead many threads of conversation - remembrances of past holidays and long lunches.

Paul Cézannes’ family home: ‘Jas de Bouffan’, Aix-en-Provence.

A photograph of the leafy residence where the Cézannes lived feels like a daydream from another age, a time when flag irises grew plush and abundant - where the dappled green of a garden of trees filled salons with shimmering jade - that specific atmosphere is very present within ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Son’, where a young boy sits, composed, if, I imagine - reluctantly so - keen to return to that garden of adventure outside the frame of the painting.

‘Portrait of the Artist’s Son’ by Paul Cézanne, 1880, oil on canvas.

But there is a darkness to this exhibition that undercuts the lightness - tasting notes of the more complex persist - certain landscapes at times feel pure Hitchcock - devoid of people, all beating heat and unnerving stillness - and the still lives - are not as they seem. Where is the turning point for when all this visual splendor fades - a season changes and fruit spoils? A watercolor series of skulls suggest an answer.

The Three Skulls by Paul Cézanne 1902-1906, Watercolour, with graphite, on ivory wove paper.

A series of the artist’s tools are on display, including this watercolor palette - still containing the remains of Cézannes iconic colour sense.

The Tate’s exhibition title: CEZANNE - reflects the artist’s style of removing the accent from Cézanne when signing his work.

The EY Exhibition: CEZANNE - until 12 March 2023

Tate Modern - tate.org.uk

Special Thanks: Anna Ovenden