141115 – Distance – The National Portrait Gallery, London

The high windows of the café at the National Gallery make the space conducive to reading. I have chosen Satre’s Intimacy an essay I have not read for decades and short enough to be read in an hour. The space is empty as we always arrive for breakfast as soon as the doors open. Intimacy upon its second read seams disjointed, unfocused. It seams to be trying too hard as it jumps from city space to the space captured by a caress. It crudely generalizes on gender and nationality describing each through the micro details of body odour or the roll of skin. The story has no rhythm or poetic but it is haunting as they are the spaces that we all know but never talk about.

We are off to The National Portrait Gallery to see the Giacometti exhibition and a small gem it is to. We are all aware of Giacometti’s ideas or presence and distance and the techniques used, the undefined edge, the elongated body and shrunken head. We are aware that the subject and background are given equal weight and that a moment and a distance are captured unique to that space and time and then vanish forever. What struck me most about Giacometti’s work was the similarity of working method across both 2D and 3D mediums. The constant building up of background, of mass and volume followed by the sharp cutting back, the incision that delineates an overlay that is the micro second before completion, the line on paint or the cut made by the knife on clay. Giacometti’s frenetic back and forth was not too dissimilar to Sartre’s spatial descriptions, so Intimacy was an appropriate prelude indeed.