Category: Art and Sculpture

Desire is that uncontrollable lust for the unobtainable. Taken, captured, delicate and vulnerable all are expressed in this caress. Soft flesh is held firmly but it is not damaged or scratched. Desire wants to own and posses, it wants to protect and love. Desire wishes the union of both parties in a reciprocal totality and when this is not forth coming desire takes in denial. Denial drives the belief of conversion, that with time she will see things my way. Desire fuels the pursuit of happiness and the fulfilment of longing. 

Here Proserpina is captured by Pluto to be his queen of the Underworld. Proserpina is later returned back to earth but is tricked into having to revisit the Underworld for four months of every year. Upon each return the earth falls into winter. The 23 year old sculpture Gian Lorenzo Bernini captures the event in Carrera marble leaving no one in doubt of his extraordinary technical skill and artistic interpretation.

The Surrogate Twin 

Excessive volumes of naked flesh fall in rolls. Fully inflated pneumatic legs and arms float out from the body to hang in mid air like helium filled sausages. Delicate and vulnerable topped with innocence and a hallo of gold. Kitsch, cute and cuddly when re-read de-contextualized by the museum and five hundred years of human history.

The Botticelli Re-Imagined exhibition has three parts the first gallery is Modern mixed medium. The second gallery is devoted to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Third to Botticelli. The exhibition has had some poor reviews but I think its well worth a visit. The Bill Viola moving Fresco will continue to be influential as we move forward to a time when augmented space is our new normality. Recommended Exhibition.

The Surrogate Twin 

It is impossible to be impassive when confronted by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The images within each painting are at once otherworldly and fantastical but slowly and surely they will eventually become disturbing. They are images created beyond the reach of the normal imagination, images of the possessed, images that question the realms of sanity, its boundaries and parameters. We cannot look at the paintings without trying to envision the man that created them. Trying to see the world through his eyes, understand his beliefs, his values, his rules or his concepts of reality. There are many good painters of the fantastical but their paintings are products of intellect and as such they can always be rationalized, explained and decoded. Imagination is an act of the intellect, it can be turned on and off and controlled The world of Bosch cannot be turned off. It is a constant embedded in his very being. He eats with it, sleeps with it, it watches him and waits for him. Bosch lived these paintings, they were his world, his reality, you can feel it, sense it in every tortured event painstakingly depicted upon the canvass. These events were experienced either in the conscience or the sub-conscience. The paintings are a diary of one mans beliefs and the pictures are read sequentially as a series of events over a period of time. Everything Bosch stood for is set out naked on the canvass, brutalised, afflicted, persecuted and punished. The paintings are a self-confession that haunts to this day and when viewed one questions the limits of ones own reality.

The Surrogate Twin

The Renaissance ideals of sensuality cover the canvasses of paintings throughout Venice. The paintings are rarely solely about beautiful women but are paintings about voyeurism and desire. Whether the voyeur be depicted within the painting or the voyeur is the viewer of the canvas the voyeur is always present. Desire is an incomplete imagined emotion. Access to the object of desire is almost always denied, unless of course you are a master of disguise such as Zeus.

The Surrogate Twin

In the Rorschach test inkblots mirrored along an axis form an image that has no intended meaning. These are shown to the patient and they are asked to describe what they see. The patients character can be broadly assessed pending the description of what is seen in the pictures. At the Hauser & Wirth Gallery Mark Wallinger does the same at a giant scale. The prints are made using his body and hands and most are over three metres tall. The audience reads their own subjective interpretation of each work. Prints are black on white.

Grief as a furious transient energy passed from the subject and absorbed by his devotees. As if facing a storm of despair into which one must lean so as to not be blown aside. The energy transmitted by grief distorts the face, it whips hair and clothes wildly flailing all into its slip-stream. Ones hands are futile protection from its powers. Grief is the scream that deafens and stuns leaving one scarred, frozen, locked into the agony of that moment of realization when loss obliterates every other perception. Grief is unforgiving, it isolates and dismembers then throws the remains to the earth. Emotion imprisoned in the tortured fired clay of remorse.

I had so been looking forward to this show but it was so disappointing but not through fault of the show but from my expectations of Delacroix. I was expecting huge scale and was met with domestic scaled pictures. So I’ll review the show that I’d hoped for.

Dive into the swirling vortex of flesh and fear. To smell the gun-smoke and blood, to hear the roar of the cannon, the charge of hooves, the cries of the doomed all captured in oils in a dynamic cohesive mass. Nostrils flared, the glint of a sabre in the horses eye, the fright of a lion, the adrenalin, the sweat with banners flying, polished brass, bright tunics rage against the Muslim warriors dressed in silks, jewels and turbans

His brow was bent, his eye was glazed; He raised his arm, and fiercely raised, And sternly shook his hand on high, As doubting to return or fly; Impatient of his flight delay’d, Here loud his raven charger neigh’d — Down glanced that hand, and grasp’d his blade; That sound had burst his waking dream, As Slumber starts at owlet’s scream, The spur hath lanced his courser’s sides; Away, away, for life he rides:    Byron- Giaour.