ART STUFF ON A TRAIN 141-150

 

‘Condo Beyond the Minimum’: Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #148

Mathis Altmann: ‘Fresh Breeze, Old Smell’, 2015 – concrete, metal, wood, mini-cam, lcd-screen, plastic, paper, cold-cathode lamps, electrical fan, carton, plexiglass

CONDO is a tidy concept: instead of struggling to meet the fixed costs of attending an Art Fair and then facing the pressure to sell which comes with that, 16 young foreign* galleries have been invited to share the space of 8 emerging London galleries, so that 24 galleries are represented in a four week festival-come-fair (to 13 Feb – www.condocomplex.org).
There was certainly a buzz when matters got under way on 16th January, when all eight spaces were crowded. and gallerists have told me since that visitors have been double the usual numbers.
My favourite pairing was at the newest gallery, Chewday’s in Vauxhall – run by Tobias Czudej, who didn’t want a tricky name to stand in the way – with Berlin’s Kraupa Tuskany-Zeidler, who didn’t, I guess, share that concern. The host’s Nicholas Cheveldave’s painting-collages festooned with webs made from friendship bracelets (how we’re trapped in social media?) meet Daniel Keller’s 3D printed digitally sliced riffs on the cairn (ancient meets modern, inter-personal is folded into the techno-corporate?) and that felt like a natural attachment. My other highlight – every home should have one – was Mathis Altmann’s weirdly atmospheric pseudo-machines with live-stream views into their concrete innards (from Supplement’s Genevan guest Truth and Consequences), one of which made a smell via oil-powering of its primitive fan. All eight spaces were lively, though, and it seems a repeatable experiment, perhaps to be hosted in alternating cities.
* Actually one of sixteen was Seventeen, so I’m counting Haggerston as foreign territory.



Nicholas Cheveldave ‘Funny Boy (detail)’. 2015

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #149: ‘Intersect’

 
 Park McArthur at Chisenhale Gallery, photo by Mark Blower

Not many exhibitions have a direct connection to the role for which I spend time on the train, but at the centre of Park McArthur’s fascinating UK debut (‘Poly’ at the Chisenhale Gallery to 3 April) is a letter from the Department of Work and Pensions. It announces the closure of the Independent Living Fund – which helps people with disabilities to live independently – in favour of new local arrangements. That’s relevant to my day-job*, to McArthur as a disability justice activist, and to the rest of the show. That’s a polyphony of polymers through which she says she wanted to think about pressure – and absorbing and expelling – in terms of the body; in materials like foam; and at the level of the millions of people expelled and absorbed through various kinds of social and economic regimes.
What do we see? A series of steel trays set atop plinths group disposable manufactured items which operate at the points of contact of bodies with each other or with their environment – such as condoms, incontinence pads, dental dams and medical breathing tubes. That suggests medical vulnerability and the potential for polymorphous contact and collective action, as well as how the DWP interfaced with people as bodies for the purposes of assessing ILF entitlement. We also encounter monumental blocks of acoustic foam; and sheets of paper pulp blooming after months of drying with the growths from a polymer powder which enabled them to take in huge amounts of water. For sounds, liquids, bodies and bureaucrats alike, it’s an absorbing show.
* Policy Manager for Health, Social Care and Welfare Reform at the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy

 
Park McArthur at Chisenhale Gallery, Photo by Mark Blower

 

 

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #147: ‘Questions Not Related to Nigella’

Julia Dault: ‘Untitled 19, 10:27 AM–1:13 PM, January 5, and 5:08–6:48 PM, January 6, 2016, installed by Simon Bird’, 2012 – Plexiglas, Tambour, Everlast boxing wraps, string

How many women have to be in a women-only show for it to look like a statement rather than a show which happens to feature female artists? Surely fewer than the 14 in Saatchi’s latest display, titled Champagne Life in half-irony, half obeisance to the sponsor’s Pommery fizz, which I was happy enough to enjoy at the opening. If it’s a statement, though, it’s unclear what that might amount to in this disparate show.

How hard can it be to install work in such a large and well-tested space? Pretty hard in the case of Alice Anderson’s 3.5m high bobbin: both the lift and the work had to be partly deconstructed to get it in. That was worthwhile, though, for the egg-umbilical fairytale Freudianism of her biggest copper thread mummifications yet. 

Is the point of such shows to facilitate photo opportunities? Maybe: the high proportion of selfie-friendly works here also include cows, equines, giant body and face magnifications and a wall of battered pans to pose before. 

Is this fairly random mix worth visiting? I’d say yes, mainly by adding Anderson and Wachtel to Julia Dault’s coiled supressions of energy, Mequitta Ahuja’s dramatic layering of paper grounds and Sigrid Holmwood’s psychedelic take on 19th century peasant life. 

Why hasn’t Holmwood used fluorescent paint since this series? They were too saleable, she told me: no champagne life for her, she needs to suffer for her art. 



Sigrid Holmwood: ‘Old Woman Hugging A Goat’, 2008 – Fluorescent lemon yellow, fluorescent flame red, lead white, cochineal, ultramarine, green earth, Spanish red ochre in egg tempera and oils on board

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #146: 

‘City of Faces’

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes: ‘Portrait of Doña Antonia Zárate’, c. 1805-1806

London’s museums have been awash with portraits recently. That’s to be expected at the National Portrait Gallery, though less so in a show about Giacometti. Yet that (to 10th Jan) was rendered no less intense by its weighting away from sculpture. The Photographic Portrait prize show (to 21st Feb) features curious choices as winners, but is overall (as usual) better than the NPG’s painting equivalent – especially as Pieter Hugo appears as a ‘special guest’. Jean-Etiene Liotard at the RA (to 31st Jan) shows himself a superior ‘painter’ in in the pastels for which he’s famous than in the surprisingly numerous oils on show. Liotard’s chalked faces take on a sepulchral luminosity regardless of how realistically he anatomises his sitters’ imperfections, whereas oils emerge rather dulled from the same touch. The V&A has the substantial display ‘Facing History: Contemporary Portraiture’, and you might also count Julia Margaret Cameron (V&A and Science Museums to 21st Feb) and Frank Auerbach (Tate Britain to 14th Feb) but I’d say it’s stretching these fine shows to call them portraiture. The daddy of them all, though, was Goya’s Portraits at the National Gallery (also to 10 Jan). Even those to whom that sounded the dullest stream of work by ‘the first modern painter’ tended to be won over by the history of Goya’s troubled times and his bravura brushwork, the close-up effects of which are often quite abstract.

Alberto Giacometti: ‘Bust of Annette’, 1954

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #145: ‘Spirit Power In Focus – and Out’

Richard Learoyd: ‘Agnes with Eyes Closed’, 2007 – Dye destruction print

There’s an unofficial festival of photography in Kensington just now. The V&A and the Science Museum both have substantial shows well into the overhang year to commemorate the bicentenary of Julia Margaret Cameron. Almost all the 200+ odd prints across the shows are from 1664-75, ie from when she was given her first camera at 48 to her emigration to what was then Ceylon). The Science Museum also has a persuasive summary of Alec Soth’s work, with a room for each of his major projects to date, and the V&A adds a 19 photo retrospective of Richard Learoyd. Even the Natural History Museum weighs in with the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2015-16. Cameron and Learoyd, in particular, share a lot. Both use demanding techniques which dictate the sizes of their prints (she the wet collodion process, which requires a glass plate to be coated with photosensitive chemicals and exposed in the camera when still damp, the glass negative returned to the darkroom to be developed, and prints made by placing the negative directly on to sensitised photographic paper and exposing it to sunlight; he the use of a room-sized camera obscura, so the subject, in another chamber with a lens dividing the rooms, is focused directly on to the paper). Both feature posed people as the subject of their best work without it ever really seeming that they are portraits. Both exploit variable focus strikingly. She was mocked for that, but we now expect such artistic effects. Either way, the energising effect is similar, and Learoyd’s work takes us back to Victorian spirit photography and the initial magical power of image capture.

Julia Margaret Cameron: ‘My Favorite Picture of All My Works. My Niece Julia, April 1867’ 

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

 

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #143: 

‘What Is and Is Not Present’

                Armin Boehm: ‘Gravity’, 2015 – oil and fabrics on wood: 110 x 70 cm

Assessment of a curation has two halves: what is there, and what isn’t? On the one hand, one could criticise S|2’s ‘The Nude in the XX & XXI Century’ (to 15 Jan) as little more than an excuse to sell a raft of paintings which Sotheby’s happens to have on consignment; point out that curator Jane Neal’s four categories of the celebrated, feared, iconographic and reclaimed male nude are fairly loose and not followed through in how the work is displayed; and suggest that it would have been more interesting to add to the women in the show (especially Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas and Caroline Walker) with, say, Sylvia Sleigh, Vanessa Beecroft, Mira Dancy, Ellen Altfest, Rebecca Warren and Marion Wagschall, so expanding the challenge to the tradition of the male gaze. On the other hand an attractive catalogue accompanies a fascinating mix of forty-odd works which also includes a radical Kees Van Dongen, two compellingly creepy paintings by Martin Eder and a chance to see Sue Webster and Tim Noble’s paintings of each other made with their feet (see https://vimeo.com/111293345). It’s also the first time I’ve seen Arin Boehm’s work in London: ‘Gravity’ is typical in showing a version of the Berliner himself acting out the suavely bohemian artist in a post-cubist space with fabric collage for emphasis. And I was struck by a jewel-like 6 x 9 inch Picasso oil of his sleeping Marie-Thérèse motif at its passionate height. So what is here is well worth seeing…

    Pablo Picasso: ‘Femme Endormie’, 1933 – oil on canvas, 16 x 24 cm


Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #142: ‘Computers at Christmas’

 

Michael Craig-Martin: ‘Apple 17inch Powerbook G4’ – Acrylic on canvas 2003

Anglo-American Michael Craig-Martin, with his biliously cool outlined objects, and former East German dissident A R Penck, with his cipher stickmen, have two of the most instantly recognisable painting styles around. Both show to advantage currently. In Craig-Martin’s case (‘Transience’ to 14 Feb), the scale of the Serpentine Gallery allows him to maximise the intensity of colour and vary his presentational tactics, while narrowing his focus to track changing technology. That triggers a memento mori path from bulbously redundant televisions to almost abstracted flatscreens, with nice little jokes thrown in. Is that credit card coloured as if ready to buy a Rothko? Are we to take trainers seriously as technology? What are those French fries doing here – are they a stand-in for computer chips? And why are they radioactively green – are French Fries that bad for you? The Penck show (‘Early Works’ at Michael Werner to 20 Feb) is more about showing his breadth. We see early paintings as his archetypes come into focus in the late sixties, and a good sample of his sculpture from the period, in which the accessible (and, consequently, crude and cheap) materials available to an unofficial artists behind The Wall translate to ramshackle range of anthropomorphic items. They now seem to criticise the crassness of communist life just as Craig-Martin deprecates the sleek triviality and passing fads of capitalism – just brought into focus by Christmas, I guess. Both artists can seem formulaic, but not here. Moreover, the two shows touch on a common subject: the computer keyboard…



AR Penck: ‘Primitive Computer’, 1968 – Oil on masonite

Paul’s ART STUFF ON A TRAIN #141: ‘Material Advantages’

Roberto Almagno: ‘Col guinzaglio tra le dita II’, 2015 – wood

For all the contemporary centrality of concept and thought, there’s still an innate satisfaction in mastery of a medium. Two artists currently demonstrate that through the assurance with which they make materials behave unexpectedly. Italian sculptor Roberto Almagno (rosenfeld porcini to 13 Feb) pretty much draws in wood, using fallen tree branches, which he smooths back and moulds using a combination of fire and water, then paints matt grey. His forms have recently become increasingly baroque and on the face of it, unarboreal. Their balance is also remarkable, as becomes clear once you notice that ‘The Leash between the Fingers II’ pivots on just one touchpoint with the wall. Add variety, shadow play and spiritual undertones and ‘Suspended in Space’ is an impressive show. Merete Rasmussen has a comparable mastery of ceramics, building complex and surprisingly large forms out of coiled stoneware. Rasmussen characterises herself as being ‘intrigued by the idea of a continuous surface’ and exploring ‘soft but precise curves, sharp edges, concave surfaces shifting to convex’ and ‘the strength of an inner space’. It would be easy to assume that the Dane’s intensely coloured ceramics are bronze – and, in a new move which is by no means coincidental for a show at the foundry-affiliated Pangolin Gallery (to 16 Jan) – some of them are.



 
Merete Rasmussen: ‘Yellow Twisted Form’, 2015 – ceramic

Most days art Critic Paul Carey-Kent spends hours on the train, traveling between his home in Southampton and his day job in London. Could he, we asked, jot down whatever came into his head?

THE MODERN WAY WITH BOSCH AND BIRDS: ART ROTTERDAM 2016

A good fair needs a combination of quirky or spectacular extras, good location, plus of course  quality art in the main section. Add that the cool yet comfortable Citizen M hotel helped my mood, and  Rotterdam delivered well...

The Extras

Leonard van Munster: Ein Goldener Berg 

The extras may seem an odd place to start. but first thing I saw as I entered the fair grounds was Leonard van Munster’s golden mountain – set back where no-one else seemed to notice it, but very popular with the geese! The Dutch artist has made several striking public commissions, but is probably best known for his kinetic self-portrait The Dancing White Man, 2012. Here his intervention is made of lifesaver foil – as used to wrap people in post-traumatic situations – and so brought in all sorts of current affairs associations beyond the initial epiphany of its improbably aureate presence. And it was hard not to think of what I was soon to see: Bosch’s great triptych in which hay stands in for the gold which the foolish pursue at the cost of their eternal damnation.

Bosch: The Haywain Triptych, 1510-16 (detail)

Other less predictable presences included a house transported from Detroit by Ryan Mendoza; live baking, photographing and consumption of bread; a mysterious cordoned-off corner protected by a VIP-style bouncer which - if you were persuasive enough – turned out to lead to a studio visit by Skype with an artist; and a the programme of 56 one minute videos curated by the impressive trio of Cécile B. Evans, Nathaniel Mellors and Shana Moulton. Off site was the chance to see Erik van Lieshout’s new installation in a church and to visit the Atelier Van Lieshout studio, so putting an end to any danger of confusing Rotterdam’s most famous artists. And a bus would take you to various institutions, the hardest to ignore being the Museum Van Beuningen (Mike Nelson plus a spectacular if not fully persuasive Ugo Rondinone show featuring life-sized clowns in a rainbow of colours) and Michael Portnoy’s compelling two hour series of linked performances using a troupe of actor / dancers moving around Witte de With and having no problem taking the audience with them). 

 Children loved mimicking Rondinone's clowns

Slightly further afield, the Stedelijk Museum in neighbouring Schiedam mounted an excellent Jan Schoonhoven survey. He'd be an auction star has he been Italian. I was surprised - given that Schoonhoven (1914-94) was a career civil servant who made papier mache constructions in his spare time - to find photographs of him being painted with spots by Yayoi Kusama at the Museum in 1967, then dancing naked save for those embellishments, glasses and socks. 

From this...

Jan Schoonhoven: R 71 - 20, 1971

To this...

Kusama and Schoonhoven

Of course, I didn't like everything: also at Witte de Witte, obsessive teddy bear collector Charlemagne Palestine delivered one of the most self-indulgent and vacuous whole floor displays I’ve ever seen. Ulay is embroiled in a court case to obtain a fairer share of earnings from his collaborations with Marina Abramovic, so I guess he could do with more substantial recognition of his solo photographic work, but his his Polaroids at the Netherlands Photo Museum fell some way short of making the case (though the 'Quickscan' survey of new Dutch photographers was good), Then there's the Rotterdam Contemporary Fair, which is such a consistent festival of bad art it maybe deserves some credit for clarity of vision (though the organisers slipped up with a pretty good video programme, and by allowing interesting artist Martijn te Winkel to take a stand); and opposite that the Kahmann Gallery somehow got away with charging an entry fee for a what turned out to be simply a display of its own artists.

Hironimus Bosch: Visions of a Genius at the Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch

You could cheat slightly this year by counting the convenient fact that the 500^th year since Bosch’s death is being celebrated – as the centrepiece of a year-round festival - by a stunning, if unsurprisingly crowded, show in his home town 80 km away (13 Feb – 8 May) . The vast majority of Bosch’s known panels and drawings have been brought together* from around the world, and the combination of a medieval worldview with what can seem a proto-modern way of envisioning it remains startling. Culled from Bosch’s less well-known drawing practice, the central image above didn’t feed into a known painting, increasing the fresh impact of a typically bizarre scene: a man armed with a lute is about to try to bash back the birds emerging from the anus of figure immured in a basket. 

* though not without its issues around cost, attributions, withdrawn loans etc, as set out at http://theartnewspaper.com/news/news/prado-pulls-two-works-from-landmark-bosch-exhibition-/?utm_source=daily_feb15_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email_daily

The location and its ripples

Rotterdam is a dynamic background city, and the Van Nellefabriek factory - a modernist icon which swallows the fair easily enough - has the added advantage of giving work a characterful context to play against. That’s something artists don’t really have at Frieze, for example.

Valérie Kolakis: Almost Familiar Place, 2016

Greek-born Montreal based Valérie Kolakis had a solo booth (for London’s FOLD) which collapsed modernism by unbuilding elements of a house in quietly uncanny style. More strikingly, she had covered the entrance area’s extensive glass doors and windows with an intricate lace-like pattern of Vaseline. I say ‘strikingly’, but those who didn’t know the building may not have suspected unless they spotted a smeared section, so convincing was the way an aspect quite other had been slid onto the Van Nellefabriek. Whether noticed or not, I like how the entrant above has clothing transformed on pushing through the doors...

Richard Woods at WORKS | PROJECTS, Somerset

It’s hard not to enjoy Richard Woods’ sassy melding of art, design and architecture, and  this mixture of old and new didn’t buck the trend. It included the seasoned  Leaning Wood and Light Sculpture, 2011, a Dan Flavin rendered satisfyingly absurd; and the sappy wall painting Duck Weave, 2016, which jazzes up what Woods says is an ancient rush-based method of constructing houses, but is also bound to trigger an art association with cotton duck canvas. Either way, a tidy contrast to Leendert van der Vlugt’s highly rational building.

Pierre Derks at LhGWR, The Hague 

Dutch video artist Pierre Derks navigates wittily between the personal and the collective as aspects of our identity construction through two main approaches. First, found scenes which fit his agenda, such as what I'm assured was the remarkable coincidence of how a passing party's coats matched a less nuanced piece of modern architecture than the Van Nellefabriek's (Here We Are Now #1, 2016 - still above); second, photographing the same scenes at different times and overlaying them so that, for example, commuters emerging from a subway feature in phone adverts behind them, or passers-by walk seamlessly between a quiet street and a protest march. 

Joep Van Liefland: Video Palace #41- Corrupter, Orbiter, Eraser (Lost Archive 1) at Van Zijll Langhout Contemporary, Amsterdam

I was amazed to find that this shrine to discarded technology set up in a building which preserves a different moment was former punk musician Joep van Liefland’s 41^st iteration since 2002 of his ‘Video Palace’ project. The Berlin-based Dutch artist uses cathode ray TVs and video cassettes and their players as his building blocks: some cassettes are arranged in painted grids, and apparently abstract stripe paintings depict the red, green, and blue light of analogue TV signals. He was a frequent viewer of low budget movies on VHS who saw them as ‘a sort of punk… low budget, improvising, but also creative in their solutions’. He then developed the idea of ‘exploring and collecting the lowest segments of the culture industry’, hinting through posters declaring its wonders at how ephemeral our superior digital means will also prove to be.

Indeed, much of the best work saw the artist, like van Liefland, put forward a distinctive view of the world, often with a focus on the mediation between human / technological and animal / natural.  Bosch would have fitted right in, if you count God as technology instead of technology as God…

The World Between Nature and Technology

Bram De Jonghe at Billytown, The Hague

Perhaps the most eccentrically interesting stand was the Belgian Bram De Jonghe’s. A neighbouring gallerist told me she’d been pleased to find considerable greenery was to be introduced, and was disappointed to find that the substantial hedge in front of Billytown’s booth remained shrink-wrapped, in line with much of De Jonghe’s work (Untitled, 2016). Perhaps the artist was blocking off any rash short-term acquisition by hedge fund managers of the sculptures which he makes out of fired tar, alluringly shiny black shapes which retain slow motion liquid properties, and so will return to a pooled state in ten years or so.

David Jablonowski: Two of the Replica series at Fons Welters, Amsterdam

David Jablonowski, a Dutch artist who examines the evolution of contemporary communication technologies in sculptures, videos, and installations, has moved into somewhat painterly territory in his new high-tech-meets-nature series ‘Replica’. Not, of course, that any paint is involved: computer-cut aluminium forms the iconic minimalist grid, on which what looks rather like a motherboard traps the chromatic flare of a parrot’s wings. Might this be the back of a computer revealing that the dreams of freedom once epitomised by flight have migrated to the virtual world? Or is there something more sinister in how beauty is pinned down here?

Pentti Sammallahti: Helsinki, Finland, 2002 at Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Amsterdam

How come Finland has produced so many good photographers? Pentti Sammallahti (born Helsinki, 1950) has travelled widely to make landscape images which are often literally animated by the fleeting and humorous role of non-human presences. Most famously he’s used dogs (emphasised by William Wegman’s canine oeuvre being shown nearby) but the best images here set their scale and temporal atmosphere by means of avian punctuation – one was of two birds on a Houston sidewalk. Yet Sammallahti retains a particular affinity for the almost visible silence and cold of the north, as in my choice of silver gelatin print, in which it's hard to resist the ridiculous impression that a balancing act is going on.

Paul Kooiker: Nude Animal Cigar, 2015 at Kromus + Zink, Berlin

Paul Kooiker (born in Rotterdam itself in 1964) subverts the tiresome coding of sepia-tinted photography as nostalgic by using filters to make contemporary riffs on the form. His Berlin gallery showed 7 of the 66 triptychs which form his recent project and book Nude Animal Cigar. Each conjoins impersonal female art subject (voyeuristic, geometrically emphatic faceless nudes) with fully visible animal (much more engaging, taken in zoos) and personal if burnt-out male art maker (remnants of some the countless cigars Kooiker has smoked in the studio). The typology yokes genres to an effect which, absurd as it is, puts various possible contrasts and equivalences crisply into play.

Mikko Rikala at Rotwand, Zurich

The Finnish artist Mikko Rikala is nothing if not ambitious, his goal being 'to understand the world beyond the rational mind'. Whether or not he succeeds, that leads him to make varied, thoughtful  and elemental works: he covers a kilometre with meditative slowness by drawing it in 1,000 parallel one metre lines; has water write to the clouds; overlays the sea at different points to condense time into too-intricate waves (Water Equals Time, 2016, shown above); and makes a sculptural play on Venice as representing the paradox of wood holding up stone. 

Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács: Establishing Eden at Akinki, Amsterdam

Margit Lukács (Amsterdam, 1973) and Persijn Broersen (Delft, 1974), who live and work between their two home cities, featured in the separate Projections film space with Establishing Eden. Referring to the shots used to establish a landscape location, and to New Zealand’s iconic role as a setting in recent cinematic history, Broersen & Lukács have reshot the original places, only to present them as moving collages of overlapping flatness which return the world-be-Eden to its status as illusion. The result is an effective new twist on the popular theme of how the mass media confuses reality and fiction.

Olivier Mosset: Untitled, 2016 at Galerie Van Gelder, Amsterdam

Finally, a special prize for courage goes to Kees van Gelder, who may have been the gallerist posing himself the most problems. First, he had to recruit students to make the commercially unavailable grey confetti with which Olivier Mosset planned a floor piece. He then attempted to open with the floor unprotected, but as the odd trample occurred, was driven to increase the piece’s protection incrementally until it was cordoned off fully by the time I arrived: on the one hand less pure, on the other emphasising the value created – it was for sale at some £30,000 - by its status as the work of the veteran Swiss-born conceptual minimalist (Mosset, with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier and Niele Toroni, was a mid 60’s founder member of the BMPT group, which famously challenged traditional means of making and personalising art).

PLIAGE: THE HOW-TO OF HANTAI'S HAND-TIED

Timothy Taylor’s survey (to 5 March) of Simon Hantaï’s Pliage ('Folding') works, 1960-82, mysteriously under-seen in the UK, is definitely a winner. All feature the Paris-based Hungarian exile’s signature approach of painting a crumpled, folded, or knotted canvas that is then straightened out and stretched. Hantaï (1922 - 2008) said his aim was to combine 'Matisse's scissors and Pollock's stick' -  the former's cutting into colour in the late work, and the latter's use of an uncentred composition. All the same, I’d have liked to see the sub-methods by which the various series were made spelled out in full. So here you are - I reckon there are nine main series, five of which are represented in the Timothy Taylor exhibition:

Mariales, 1960 - at TT

The Mariales or 'Cloaks of the Virgin' (1960-62) are inspired by the Virgin Mary opening her cloak to humanity. The canvas is creased edge to edge, the exposed parts painted, the canvas unfolded (but not fully flattened out) and the blank spaces painted, yielding colour pretty much all-over.

Catamurons, 1963 - at TT

The Catamurons (1963-64) are named from the house he stayed in at Varengeville with his family each summer. The folded canvas is painted, then covered with a layer of white paint; afterwards, the four edges are folded in, and the square that remains is again crumpled and painted several times.

Panse, 1985 - not at TT

The Panses ('Paunches' or 'Bellies' - 1964-65) knotted canvas at the four angles, scrunching into a bag-like form, before painting and unfolding several times to make one shape floating in space. 

Meun, 1968 - at TT

The Meuns (1967-68), painted after Hantaï moved to village of Meun, are made from pieces of canvas folded on both sides to resemble sacks with large knots at the corners and a string at the centre. They are is painted in one colour on white before the unfolding.

Etude, 1989 - not at TT

The Études (1968–69) are creased edge to edge, and are the first series in which Hantaïi switched from oil to acrylic, painting a single colour to contrast with the canvas's residual whiite 

Untitled, 1971 - not at TT

In the Aquarelles (1970–73) Hantaï used watercolour on thorough creasing in a smaller-scale tondo format.

  
Tabula (Terre Rose), 1975

The large series of Tabulas (1972-82) achieve an almost geometric composition by systematically knotting the canvas in strategically chosen spots, unfolding it into a large number of small squares or rectangles to make a grid offset by the irregular penetration of the white. Each square becomes a pliage of its own.

Tabula (rouge/noir), 1981 - at TT

Although not strictly a separate series, the effect is rather different when the square elements are simplified down to one or two elements only.

Blanc, 1973 - not at TT

The Blancs (1973-74) are irregularly folded, then painted with multipliple colors so that after unfolding, the unpainted white areas react diffirently with the various colours. They ask whether the unpainted area will become more active here than in the Etudes.

Tabula lilas, 1982 - not at TT

The Tabulas lilas (1982), made after a three year hiatus of not painting, employ white paint over white canvas. 

There was also a chance to see Hantaï in action - via a screening of Jeanne Michel Meurice's documentary film of Hantai at 55 - what was most striking was how hands-on and \9he didn't seem in the best of health) exhausting the process of making the big Tabula was, with scenes of the tying up of canvas, use of a lawn roller to flatten the folds in place, emphsison the non-mechanical in the painting ('you have to feel the canvas', he said), and scenes of Hantai diving under the canvas to straighten it out...  Bach and Cezanne ('colour is the place where brain and universe meet' was themost memorable Cezanne quote) emerged as his biggest inspirations.