Metaphysics of the paladin
Visited the Fitzwilliam Museum a couple of lunchtimes ago, feeling in need of some visual inspiration and refreshment.
The Shiba Room is the part of the museum I like best. As its name suggests, it was endowed by Japanese philanthropists, and is a small room designed for the exhibiting of works on paper. The atmosphere is always quiet and dim, with heavy doors, neutral colours, big glass display cabinets, and conservation-aware light-levels. My favourite show to date there was a selection of prints by Yoshitoshi.
This time, they had featured etchings by Christopher Le Brun. Not an artist I was previously familiar with, but I would now recommend him highly. On show were a selection of works from his opus "Fifty Etchings", produced in luxurious limited edition for Paragon Press. (Beautiful typesetting on the intro page and colophon).
First impressions were of soft black ink and creamy, heavy, textured paper. The dominant recurring image (mixed in with some organic, but still iconographic, abstraction) was of a questing knight. The knight rides through a dense forest; he journeys along dusty paths; he leads his horse by a vast lake. Through the trees, down the road, across the lake, he glimpses a dark tower - which he never seems to reach. At times, he encounters his self as a skeleton: bleak vision or memento mori. In dreams, he glimpses his self as pilgrim or traveller, striding through other worlds, down other roads. At times, he descends into a dark well - whether optimistically, or pessimistically, the viewer is left to determine.
Le Brun seems to disavow modern art's obsession with teleology and narratives of 'the new'. He works with known imagery, myth, cultural resonance. I saw visual influences from Samuel Palmer, Rembrandt, Munch, among others. Literary points de répère in Dante, Malory, Shakespeare.
I was intrigued by his words from a lecture given to the Royal Academy in 2004:
"Representation in art achieves significance [or depth] when it relates to a shared background of memory and association. I would argue that culture is established by critical accumulation and diminished by substitution. Just as in the forest the great trees depend for their size and majesty on dense and diverse brushwood, so new layers and developments in art have a symbiotic relationship with individual works which nourishes their potential to convey meaning."
"George Steiner described the way literature achieves this level of resonance as “the field of prepared echo”. With this image he vividly conveys the working of the canon of western art. It is the agreed ‘given’ of what is seen, through the test of permanence, to have value, and allows density of meaning to build up. Without this density high culture is impossible. In such a “field”, new ideas and how they speak within history can be rapidly and intuitively understood."
One of the most metaphysical and interesting shows I've seen in a long time.
The Shiba Room is the part of the museum I like best. As its name suggests, it was endowed by Japanese philanthropists, and is a small room designed for the exhibiting of works on paper. The atmosphere is always quiet and dim, with heavy doors, neutral colours, big glass display cabinets, and conservation-aware light-levels. My favourite show to date there was a selection of prints by Yoshitoshi.
This time, they had featured etchings by Christopher Le Brun. Not an artist I was previously familiar with, but I would now recommend him highly. On show were a selection of works from his opus "Fifty Etchings", produced in luxurious limited edition for Paragon Press. (Beautiful typesetting on the intro page and colophon).
First impressions were of soft black ink and creamy, heavy, textured paper. The dominant recurring image (mixed in with some organic, but still iconographic, abstraction) was of a questing knight. The knight rides through a dense forest; he journeys along dusty paths; he leads his horse by a vast lake. Through the trees, down the road, across the lake, he glimpses a dark tower - which he never seems to reach. At times, he encounters his self as a skeleton: bleak vision or memento mori. In dreams, he glimpses his self as pilgrim or traveller, striding through other worlds, down other roads. At times, he descends into a dark well - whether optimistically, or pessimistically, the viewer is left to determine.
Le Brun seems to disavow modern art's obsession with teleology and narratives of 'the new'. He works with known imagery, myth, cultural resonance. I saw visual influences from Samuel Palmer, Rembrandt, Munch, among others. Literary points de répère in Dante, Malory, Shakespeare.
I was intrigued by his words from a lecture given to the Royal Academy in 2004:
"Representation in art achieves significance [or depth] when it relates to a shared background of memory and association. I would argue that culture is established by critical accumulation and diminished by substitution. Just as in the forest the great trees depend for their size and majesty on dense and diverse brushwood, so new layers and developments in art have a symbiotic relationship with individual works which nourishes their potential to convey meaning."
"George Steiner described the way literature achieves this level of resonance as “the field of prepared echo”. With this image he vividly conveys the working of the canon of western art. It is the agreed ‘given’ of what is seen, through the test of permanence, to have value, and allows density of meaning to build up. Without this density high culture is impossible. In such a “field”, new ideas and how they speak within history can be rapidly and intuitively understood."
One of the most metaphysical and interesting shows I've seen in a long time.