Just like music

The camera follows the man as he walksalong a gravel path. He is in a park, a place of controlled nature. You might describe him as ‘dapper’ – elderly, but straight; standing tall, like one of the trees he passes. He has a neat grey mustache and blue eyes. There is something determined in his stance, the way he looks ahead of him – not at the camera, not at us – but at a point of destination, somewhere out of the frame.

A perfect analogy for how the man in the film, the painter Raoul de Keyser, saw beyond us. In his early period his subjects were the real, tangible objects of living – door handles and walking sticks – depicted as we might recognize them; as his work developed, his gestures shift to more indeterminate shapes. You can read these later abstracts as symbols for how we feel, how we construct memory (sometimes as shapes coming to us from the haze). 

If he were still around, I suspect he would have liked the setting of his current UK exhibition, his work juxtaposed against the classical architecture of Inverleith House, its formal gardens. The paintings are at home in these neat but compact spaces – de Keyser’s work is generally on a small scale; the paintings are about compressed moments rather than grand statements. 

I first saw de Keyser’s work at one of my favourite galleries, Zeno X in Antwerp. As an artist who remained in his hometown of Deinze all his life, there is a Flemish sensibility in the work. The Belgian artists of his generation respect painting (I think painting is considered to be a bit old fashioned in the UK at present) but recognise that painting must move beyond the confines of form and technique. Bernard Dewulf, writing in a catalogue produced for the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2009 said:

Writing about paintings is always wrong and hopeless, but writing about de Keyser’s work is all the more so. De Keyser paints at the edge of what can be painted, moving away from that which can be said. More than any other painter, he compels us to look intensely, time and again. The risk is that we look too far. But looking is the only thing we can … there is hardly a story, there is hardly an image, there is no excuse.

But there is an echo of what’s come before. In those early figurative works, there is a nod to the Netherlandish still life tradition, which might be harder to recognise in the mysterious later paintings. But in their small scale, their intimate, introspective stance, they are also about privacy and internalization. De Keyser liked to make analogies to music when talking about his work, and I think too of the women of Vermeer and de Hooch we see playing instruments, their music merging with their thoughts; sometimes we do not see their faces, only their still backs, as we stand behind them. Somehow when we look at a de Keyser, we are seeing the artist from behind, not able to read his expression, or to know his thoughts. But something is transmitted, as in music, something which can’t fully be explained.

A little train

If concrete poetry is a form which confounds the reader’s sense of meaning, then perhaps it is easier to think of it not as poetry – something which can be read and (eventually, in the case of some poems) understood – but as an arrangement of letters and sometimes words which pleases the eye simply in its presentation of forms and shapes. Ian Hamilton Finlay believed that concrete poetry is voiceless, not meant to be spoken.

I was thinking of this when entering the recent exhibition of Mira Schendel’s work at Hauser and Wirth. The creation of her monotypes was occasioned by the gift of a ream of Japanese rice paper, so fine and thin that Schendel wanted to exploit the difficulty of the material. But every time she tried to draw or paint on the paper, it would tear. What emerged, she said, came ‘out of chance and curiosity’. The process she adopted was to cover a glass surface with oil paint, then laying a sheet of rice paper over the top and using either her fingertips or the side of her hand she would create shapes. What we get feels handmade because it is – the hand being the tool employed, rather than a brush or pen.

Like Gego, Schendel came to South America from Europe. Words and phrases enter the work in multiple languages. She was inspired too by Stockhausen and his Song of the Youths which took texts from the Book of Daniel. These fragmented and layered languages and texts might give the impression of many voices at once. Laid out in the gallery in a stretch of cases along the walls, the reflections of West End buildings also merged with the frail marks, to give the impression of birds taking off into the air.

Schendel wants us to associate these drawings with movement. Sometimes she lifts the sheets out of the cases and suspends them from wires, as in the sculptural piece Trenzinho / Little Train, a train moving through an imaginary landscape, a train of thought, a flimsy sheet of paper trained to become something more than itself. But ‘little’ keeps us focused on the scale, thinking about the artist stringing these sheets herself, no higher than her body can reach; the intimacy of the hand. Hand made.

Schendel liked the fact we can see through the paper, so that each drawing, whether laid flat or strung along in air, is itself, but also what we can see through it. The drawings in the cases and their reflected city in the glass providing us with a double view, but also the illusion of something reflective rather than transparent – pick a sheet up our of its case, and we would see our own hand through it.

I followed Schendel’s train out of my own city, and to another – Edinburgh – where her work is part of a group show of South American constructivists. Her disk of letters, like the monotypes, stems from the idea of ‘seeing through something’, how that expression really means gaining the truth by exposing the artifice; but Schendel subverts that by asking us to ‘read’ a text that isn’t fixed, that dances in the air and is transparent.

I love being confounded by her wor(l)d.

Taking stock

On another art crawl around London with Paul Carey Kent. Paul’s walks are now so popular that sometimes twenty or more people are trailing after him (he walks fast) from one gallery to another (and in all, he is known and greeted warmly). These walks are not just a way to see what’s on in London, but also a way for artists and writers to meet and compare notes, look at things together and sometimes have a good old fashioned argument about what works and what doesn’t. Paul always plans the itinerary in advance, and today, we are covering Kings Cross, Old Street and Bloomsbury.

Next door to each other, in Victoria Miro and Parasol Unit respectively, are new shows from Sarah Sze and Katy Moran. A dialogue emerges between the two artists (women of roughly the same generation) centered around collecting and assembling. Although Moran’s work is on the surface more traditional, focused on painting, it’s what she crams into her small-scale canvases that is surprising. Her titles suggest the bright and kooky world of cartoons, circus, the world in all its variety, and they give a hint that the paintings are more than they appear. From a distance, they are densely patterned, energetic abstract swirls, but only when you get up close do you realize that they contain multilayered collaged bits from books and magazines, often masked or veiled by Moran’s brush. Figures emerge from the chaos of paint. Moran turns the canvas around while she’s working, so everything’s turned on its head, and there’s often no clear way in, we just need to follow her down the particular maze she leading us through. 

I saw her work first at Tate St Ives some years ago, and while I liked it then, the new paintings seem to be richer, more worked, more complex – the difference between early Pound and the Cantos. Like opening an attic door and peering into the darkness and clutter, knowing you will find treasure.

Although there are silkscreen prints in Sarah Sze’s show (not so successful for me), she is primarily a sculptor, or more accurately, a compiler of installations. I was impressed with her Venice Biennale show in 2013, when she turned the United States Pavilion into the lab of a mad scientist, the strange assemblage actually snaking its way out of the building.

I loved the chaos and bustle, but also felt there was too much (and my photos capture certain individual elements I loved rather than trying to encompass the entire installation). 

Here at Victoria Miro, not everything works. The installation on the lower level seems without focus. The piece is called Still Life with Desk, and the individual elements don’t seem to add up to much, apart from maybe trying to get at what’s in the head of the artist or writer at the moment of creation. It’s the piece upstairs, Calendar Series, that impressed me and reminded me of the best moments of her Venice show.

The floor is covered in front pages from The New York Times, spanning a period of months from July to October 2013. Sze has doctored the cover photographs, replaced them with images that appear to be from the natural and celestial worlds, created an assemblage of three-dimensional objects to match the photos. The pages is lit with a series of desk lamps, each casting a small pool of light over its chosen page in the darkened space. I think of labs, libraries, archives, places of study or research, the object of the research perhaps newsworthy, but odd in its isolation, its difficulty to categorise in any satisfactory manner.

I’ve focused on those two exhibitions in detail, but we also covered the extraordinary Richard Serra show at Gagosian http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/richard-serra–october-11-2014 the disturbingly beautiful sculptures of David Altmejd at Modern Art http://www.modernart.net/view.html?id=1,4,1260,1261 and the gorgeous ‘tapestries’ made from old bottle caps and bits of metal by El Anatsui at the October Gallery http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/exhibitions/2015els/index.shtml . All worth catching.

Virtue and the sea

To the Towner at Eastbourne, and John Virtue’s incredible paintings. For the last five years, Virtue has been examining the sea, in all its moods and gestures, from the vantage point of his home in Blakeney. Not the relatively gentle English Channel that frames our currentjourney along the coast, but the North Sea, an altogether more wild and intenseplace. I too have been getting to know that coastline over the last ten years,from my perch near Aldeburgh, and what Virtue has captured for me (more so thanHambling, who has also made the North Sea her subject) is its grey strangeinhuman turbulence. His paintings remind me of the John Montague poem I consider most accurate at capturing its emotional scope:

North Sea

From the cold depths
towards the shelf of Europe
the waves press, hotel fronts
streaked with rain, bleached
blue bathing huts, enduring like
rocks, on wind ravelled sand.

& the dome of the casino
glistening: a tethered balloon.

Perfect setting for
the almost forgotten monster
of unhappiness to clank ashore
(an old horror movie come true)
to where rain spits on
your hotel window
& claim you.

(image by Corey Arnold, from his series The North Sea)

That’s what Virtue does, with his monochromatic palette, he creates something immediately known from our beachgazing, but also completely abstract, a dash of grey, a splotch of white, and we are lost somewhere else, somewhere inside, with the monster of unhappiness clanking down. The paintings are huge, and so you can get lost, as you might get lost at sea, or lost in your thoughts. They are daydreams you can walk inside; you can see the arc of water, the gesture of a man waving his hand over the canvas. For works which are so physical, so full of movement and drama, they are also oddly still, as if what Virtue has really found is the core of the sea, a whirlpool that sweeps us into silence. 

Like a poem, the paintings are built overtime, one gesture, then another, then another. The paintings start as sketches, small watercolour notes to the artist, that Virtue makes while he’s walking, the same walk over Blakeney Point, in all seasons and weathers. In that, he is like Turner, observing the changes over a single location. But whereas Turner was, even in his most abstract moments, trying to portray what weather really looks like, Virtue is already memorialising it, committing it to black and white. It’s really the memory of the sea he’s painting, the thing he’s carried home in his head, then placed on canvas, not just the sea, but the way it’s made him feel.

Among the tombs

Readers may recall I blogged about a fascinating walk I did last year, in the company of the poet Stephen Watts, exploring hidden corners of the East End that appear in WG Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Keen to revisit some of those locations, my Hercules co-publisher Vici MacDonald and I took a small group of generous sponsors of Heart Archives (including author Sue Rose) on a short perambulation around the old Jewish cemeteries of Mile End. We were fortunate in meeting up with Susie Clapham, architect and chronicler of lost street furniture http://anomaliesofloststreetfurniture.blogspot.co.uk/. She has taken a special interest in the cemeteries, especially the one at Bancroft Road. More on that later.

We began in Alderney Road, where Stephen also began with his group some months back. As I mentioned in my previous post, Alderney Road is the location of the oldest Ashkenazi cemetery in the UK. Although Sebald chose to situate his protagonist in a house adjacent to the burial ground, he is unable to see into over the high wall. This seems to me to be a typical Sebaldean device – to give us a glimpse, a speck of knowledge, so that the quest becomes as crucial as the discovery. But just as Austerlitz is one day lucky enough to come across the open door in the wall, we too were given access.

 It is, as I’ve said before, a beautiful and moving place, as Austerlitz says, ‘a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time.’ It may have meant more seeing as a fair proportion our little group, including Sue and myself, have Ashkenazi roots. Standing there I was reminded of a line from one of Sue’s poems, ‘Mahler 9’, in which she writes: ‘we all carry our dead / with us on a quest for new homes, the klezmer dance / in our head propelling us forward, the fiddle pulling us back.’

Susie took us round the corner into the Bancroft Road cemetery, which I had previously only seen from the street (many only glimpse it momentarily from the train, as they arrive into London via Liverpool Street), and what struck me most was how vulnerable that small plot feels amid the council blocks and early Victorian terraces of Stepney. The apple tree stranded at the far end by the fence, its fruit rotten and spoiled on the ground, seemed a metaphor for what has happened to the place, bombed in the war, vandalised in later years. There were a few stones still standing, some still legible. We were moved by the grave of a child, his stone although toppled, intact.

That ‘quest for new homes’ is something too that struck a chord with our group, assembled as we were from America, Canada and the Czech Republic. We found ourselves next on the Queen Mary campus, surrounded by bleary-eyed weekend students, viewing the Velho Novo Cemetery, a desert of the dead amidst the stark brick architecture of the modern university. I have written about the history of the Sephardi cemeteries when I visited with Stephen, but it is worth mentioning how strange these sites are in their modern context, especially the one bang in the middle of campus.

But it was the Velho Old which was most hidden, most secret of them all. A security guard escorted us through back alleys of the campus to a gate on the side of one of the dormitories, then through a courtyard enclosed in a metal fence, before finally opening a gate at the end. There is a fascinating history of the Velho Old site here: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&CRid=2246135. It is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the UK, the land gifted to the Sephardic community by Oliver Cromwell. It must be one of the most peaceful locations in London, but also one of the most alien. The traces of Hebrew and Portuguese (most of the inscriptions have been rubbed clean by age and pollution), the foreignness of the names we could still make out – all seemed to belong not only to another age, but another land altogether.

Possibly the oddest moment of our tour was when a local resident on the other side of the fence (ironically, an American) started speaking to us, shocked to find anyone in the cemetery (‘no one is ever in here’, he said). ‘Don’t worry, we’re not ghosts’ one of our party replied. But actually, it felt as if we were, as I always feel when visiting a cemetery, that strange exhilaration of being alive, with the dead under my feet, and thinking of the famous epitaph as I am now so you shall be.