Syndics of the Drapers' Guild (1662)

Rembrandt paints the moment the deal is struck. The drapers syndics cast their critical idea over the Rembrandt's materials. 

We're not sure about any of these ideas Mr van Rijn. Do you have anything else? 

You don't like that? Well, then, just as you are, right now. That's fine. Like that. Like you are.

And the best thing is that he persuades them. So the Syndics cast their critical eye on us. Measure us up - it's a negotiation - no-one must be sold short. 

an atrium in the desert

Paul Klee making visible (making im-material)
On at the Tate Modern, London until 9th March 2014

1. 
Hotel rooms. lego blocks 
by a lake. atrium in the desert
at the top of the green fields
the Kasbah folding up into the size of a postage stamp

through a letter box. 
trailing umbilical cord
hushed flaps sail. I can see it all. 

2. traces

at the museum Neue Kunst Hans Goltz
a clockwork mechanism counts down
the silent fishing rod hook beneath the lake
pendulum still, rotations still
tides round the hot lazy sun. 

3. 
tattoos peeling off the sheets
scrolls pressed and dried
toner unfixed
I press through the sheets 
and oil on my palms. 

substance - glass - scales 
shield and reflect 
but the gills let the right ones in

4. 
In the aerodrome hotel a telescope landing strip

the city flattens out. 

5.  etre 
ruined architraves
ancient futures in fish eye memories
the memory of bulbs, from inside out
slicing through the onion epidermis

sandstone's memory, an ocean mountain

this is a concentration game
like a computer game
pinball. architect. dot matrix
woven tear garden

6. 
The cloth makers cottages along Claygate. Three children run to sunday school or out onto the wash. The light curves drawn out onto the open fields. The land here is beneath sea level and so water flows downhill towards the centre. The birds know this and nest. The alphabet's visible root structures. It's the catastrophe of a dream. It's a dot on the map. 

Gerhard Richter: Portraits

Gerhard Richter: Portraits
National Gallery, London
27 February - 31st May 2009

Razor sharp focus. It’s a prerequisite of the photography industry. The images that surround us offer the eye the illusion of every detail. For this reason viewing Gerhard Richter’s Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery challenges the eye.

The hallmark of Richter’s portraits are paintings that subordinate the photographic image for very different ends. The canvases offer the shapes of figures which on closer inspection break up into flat layers of paint. Richter’s most striking technique, which is in evidence throughout this retrospective, is to rake a brush across the damp canvas smudging the tones together. The result gives an appearance of automatism to his images; As if they had been produced by a period photocopier or printer. These surfaces are Richter’s tool to inhibit the viewer’s attempt at interpretation. From a photograph we expect a copy of reality. However, here the viewer is required to consider a number of visual contradictions: paintings that appear to be photos, figures that remain illusive, canvases that have the appearance of mass produced objects.

The exhibition contains further illuminating contrasts in Richter’s work. The atrium of the gallery is filled with Richter’s monumental 48 Portraits a work which dryly offers us a canon of great white males looking down on the viewer. Take the elevator to the upper galleries and you rise up through the ranks. However, the prevalent subject matter here is not the iconic image but the family portrait. This is an object that he describes as a modern ‘devotional picture.’ With these images Richter offers the viewer a chance to glimpse into personal relationships while emphasizing their conceal realities. Richter portrays his daughters in a way that both captures personality and side steps it by hiding the subject’s face of using an unusual angle. In a small self-portrait Richter appears to be emerging from deep inside the picture. Coming into focus, but looking away from the camera as if to resist its gaze.

The final surprise is Richter’s installation of a mirror in the gallery as the exhibition’s final work. Richter compares the mirror to one of his paintings, suggesting that it offers a semblance of the thing without showing us the object itself. Seeing oneself staring into the mirror with the traffic of the gallery behind offers exactly this experience. It reminds me of Velasquez’s Las Meninas; suddenly we’re

Lowlands

I travelled to The Hague and Delft, home of 17th century painter Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer's archetypal image is that of the figure at the window. An interior flooded with cool light. They offer a naturalism pregnant with allegorical possibility.

A girl in servants clothing looks over her shoulder, exposing a pearl earring. The iconic image resides in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, concealing a mystery that rivals the Mona Lisa's smile. It's miniature size and canvas stripped bare of context gives the image the quality of a deftly executed part work. The floating fragment of a unrealised idea.

My travel photos also offer a speculative narrative . I went looking for the quality of Vermeer's light, falling through the curtains, through the blinds. Here are some fragments. I'm putting them together to see if they might suggest a story







images (c) David Foster 2009

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.

Gerhard Richter 4900 Colours: Version II, 2007
Enamel paint on Aludibond
49 Panels, each 97 × 97 cm
La Collection de la Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création
© 2008 Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter:

4900 Colours: Version II

Serpentine Gallery, London

23^rd September – 16^th November 2008

German painter and photographer Richter is exhibiting 49 paintings at the Serpentine which are composed of hundreds of blocks of flat colour. They were composed by a computer programme which calculated created an entirely chance configuration of tones. The gallery note informs us that a dice was then rolled by Richter to choose the orientation and positioning of the works in the gallery.

Standing in the central space of the Serpentine the blocks of colour give me the sense of being in a nursery. The statistical operations they represent lead me back to thinking about the power of number crunching data to rip huge wormholes in national economies when put into the hands of investment bankers. It also reminds me of a title: ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.’

Richter’s dice operation makes me think about Stéphane Mallarmé rich and strange poem. I don’t pretend to understand it but I looked it up this evening and was stunned again by its beauty. It's criminal to try and typeset it or translate extracts out of context so here are a few pages from the original French booklet:

A THROW OF THE DICE



NEVER

even when cast in the eternal circumstance

of a shipwreck's depth

You can see the full image of the book here:

http://www.my-os.net/blog/index.php?Graphisme/2006/11

The full text in French and English here:

http://www.tonykline.co.uk/