Sunday 14 November 2010

Hi campers,

A great and joyous beam of light has shone from the leaden skies, above Tilburg, Holland, where yesterday I visited the exhibition of HOWARD HODGKIN's latest paintings (2000-2010), at the Museum of contemporary Art.
Paradoxically, the best exhibitions are always those that I want to leave immediately. After about 15 minutes of contemplating the works, I feel an irresistible urge to rush home, or rather, to the studio, and there to work, to work and to fully enjoy the supreme freedom that the contemplated paintings have promised me.

Une promesse de bonheur (Stendhal).

Hodgkin's painting does what all great painting aims to do: it shows us that we are free. There is very little, in the field of human endeavour, capable of giving us this joy. Hodgkin's painting pulls out all the stops, it is a veritable feast. Especially so in these bleak painting-poor days.

Two things struck me: (1) other visitors seemed truly touched, and at the very least, aesthetically attracted by the paintings; and (2) slightly more than half the visitors (my reckoning), thought it necessary to meekly follow a 'guide', to listen to what this guide had gleaned from a very limited bibliography, instead of bloody well using their own individual senses and sensibilities and confronting the works ohne Leitung eines anderen, as Immanuel Kant would have it.
It just shows how real and how substantial the fear of the average exhibition visitor is, when confronted with painting.
Exhibition guides should be locked up and possibly re-educated (but by whom?). Visitors asking for a guided tour should be barred forthwith from the premises, for they never even intended to look at the paintings, and moreover, they waste precious floor space and disrupt the relative silence. Guided tours make it nigh impossible for the other visitors to discover the silent music of painting.

Howard Hodgkin's painting seems at first glance to attract because of its considered, 'tasteful' use of colour, texture, even its evocative titles. Indeed, there is no sin in falling in love with a patch of colour, with a rapport between two colours, or in dreaming away at the poetry of a title, but these elements do not constitute the supreme freedom, mentioned above. The painter himself says that colour does not mean a thing. He clearly states that he NEVER tries to make a beautiful painting (does one have to be a painter to fully enjoy the pleasure of hearing these simple truths?). He believes that talent is much overrated, just as I myself do. Moreover, there is no direct relation between the painting and its title, so that musing on the meaning of the title gets one further and further into literature, and thus, away from painting (personally, I believe that the title of a painting has about the same function as its frame: to establish the viewer's attention, to isolate the painting from its surroundings).
All that counts is that the viewer dares to confront the painting, in silence, to undergo the dynamics of rhythm and scale, the journey of the eye, the respiration of colour, the light and space of the painting.

So what distinguishes Hodgkin's paintings from so many others? Take a look around the museum: compare the cerebral and rather 'dry', 'cold' paintings by Sigmar Polke, then again the joyful, 'curious' works by Richter, and then, sadly, the indifferent miserly little pieces of museum decoration by Tuymans. Or just imagine how many well-meaning painters will within the coming months bring forth 'Hodgkin-inspired' paintings, after visiting this exhibition (this is a 'natural' law of causality in the art world).
What distinguishes good painting from bad or indifferent painting, or, even more succinctly, painting from non-painting, is this: a truly obstinate insatisfaction on the part of the painter. In the barely bearable loneliness of the studio, the painter rejects hundreds of paintings for every painting that he 'finishes' (or leaves alone). Each of these hundreds of rejects push the 'finished' painting forward, into life. It is ourselves that we see in it, and it shows us that we are free.

Greetings,

and have a look at:

http://www.howardhodgkin.org.uk