Gregory Crewdson, An Eclipse of Moths, Galerie Templon

Gregory Crewdson, Redemption Center, 2018-2019

On day one of the lockdown light as it was labelled by the French government, the French protested and I went to look at art. My first stop was Galerie Templon's new space on the rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare to see the Gregory Crewdson exhibition. These sixteen new works by one of America's most interesting contemporary photographers are troubling and confounding thanks to the images' representation a horrifying view of America. Learning more about Crewdson's process brings relief. We learn that the photographs are obsessively staged images floating somewhere between a surreal fantasy, a horror film and the harsh reality of contemporary America. In other words, there is no place that looks like the one in the photographs.

Gregory Crewdson, The Taxi Depot, 2018-2019

Each image contains at least two people, usually stopped in the middle of an action, each separated from the others, isolated. Crewdson's production process of composing multiple exposures produces human figures whose bodies are exposed, both physically and emotionally. Their skin looks like wax and their situation is distressing. Often the fact that they stand still adds to the sense that they are more like zombies than people. In one of the rare moments of human life found in these photographs, a young man on a verandah holds a baby's bottle of milk, staring into the distance. At the bottom of the stairs leading to the road below, a pram that, like every other object in Crewdson 's photographs, could have been sitting there for decades. Nothing looks as though it was recently used or is usable and yet, in the middle of it all, a baby is alive. 

Gregory Crewdson, The Cobra, 2018-2019

The figures are always suspended in worlds that cannot nurture them, a carpark with old furniture, an industrial lot, a street blocked by a fallen light post, a dilapidated back lot filled with concrete slabs, a fallen tree, cast off rubber tyres. Within spaces littered with the refuse of another era, the people seem to be caught in the middle of activities that make no sense - young boys asleep on an old mattress in the middle of an old driveway surrounded by the puddles of yesterday's rain. A woman looking at an ambulance stretcher in the middle of a clearing, another sitting in a wheelchair on a dirt driveway, an old juke box ten feet away. Each person, like the surrounding objects, has been very carefully placed on the "set," that tells of a story on pause. We keep wondering what just happened? why are they there? what's going to become of them in this hostile environment? And, of course, this is America in 2020. Again and again, signs of sickness populate the frame: the ambulance stretcher, but also a woman's leg gouged out, a man on crutches, others lying down. it is a world of disease in all its various meanings

Gregory Crewdson, Red Star Express, 2018-2019

It is not only what is in the photographs that makes them unsettling, even troubling. The view presented is impossible. The angle from which the scene is photographed is always slightly elevated, as though the viewer is  being invited to swoop down onto the scene. But yet, we are suspended above this world that has been stopped in its tracks. The aspect ratio of the photographs is also unusual, closer to that of widescreeen cinema than to the traditional formats of photography. I found myself discovering the images laterally, walking across them, searching for clues of a trace of life that I might have missed. I felt as though I was trying to find a way out of this surreal nightmare that is rural America. But there is no way out.

Gregory Crewdson, Cherry Street, 2018-2019

In keeping with - or perhaps in contradistinction to - the cinematicity of the Twin Peaks-ike world of the town in the photographs, it is geographically and historically isolated, out of time and place. It is not just that the action has been stopped by the projectionist. From what we see in the photographs the town has stopped in time. This, despite the fact that there is a keen sense of repetition, the same place used over again in different images, from a new perspective. Every object is stopped in historical time; the containers have been uncoupled from truck engines and they sit, idle, one in flames, while young boys wander across a road in the foreground. Geographically, we see hills in the background, but there is no sense of a world outside of this timeless nightmare.

The title, An Eclipse of Moths, is curious for a series of works in which there is very little sign of life. We think of moths as swarming around an artificial light, in order to expose their wings, even if it is only on the way to their death. In Crewdson's photographs, there is no buzzing, let alone urgency of any kind.

Gregory Crewdson, Funeral Back Lot, 2018-2019

A street sign in the photograph with the man and the child's pram spells A L O N E. We can still see the erased M. A L O N E is nevertheless the message that I get when looking at these photographs. Everyone is alone - isolated from others in the spaces they occupy, like the times we live in, the narratives we inhabit. In addition, the sense of isolation from the rest of the world, of being left alone to fight on for one's life in a world that cannot and does not attempt to nourish, is a familiar state of affairs

Robert Rauschenberg, Nightshades and Phantoms @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Robert Rauschenberg, Purr (Night Shade), 1991

Robert Rauschenberg did a lot of experimenting with metal the 1990s. The works currently on exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, Night Shades and Phantoms, are among the most haunting made in this time, perhaps because of the predominance of black, white and grey. Their bringing together of industrial materials, painting and intellectual issues that preoccupied artists at this time, also make them of their era. That said, there is nothing outdated about Night Shades and Phantoms, and neither are they any less mesmerizing than they were in the 1990s. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Marsh Haven (Phantom), 1991

Robert Rauschenberg, Office Break (Phantom), 1991

In many of the works, Rauschenberg brings together two or three photographs screen printed onto the metal supports, creating surfaces filled with a multiplication of bifurcations and trifurcations. Beyond the surface, there is tension between the metal and the image printed and/or painted on its surface, often of nature or cloth blowing int he wind. The transience of the fabric, animals and plants is always in tension with the apparent industrial intransigence of metal. In the images of the Phantom series, doors and windows, shadows and trees float over the surface of the mirrored aluminium, appearing and disappearing, depending on where we stand. There are also tensions and conflicts between the layers they create, layers of images jostling on and as the surface. Indeed, the works are all about surface. They are about the properties and fabric of aluminium put to an unusual use, as support for images that are filled with walls, windows, curtains, doorways, and signage. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Bounders (Phantom), 1991

Rauschenberg's process creates more conflicts and clashes. Photographs printed or screened onto metal supports produce a merging of multiple mass produced images into a one of a kind. Rauschenberg took the photographs with a Polaroid camera driving across the US, and thus, ended up with single images without negatives taken in places on his trail. Reproduction of any kind was out of the question. The hand made, carefully crafted images often have a stroke of paint on their surface, a brush of tarnish on aluminium, the single artistic gesture to seal their uniqueness. The transience of the process is likewise repeated in the appearance of "phantoms"; the ink can be so faint that the images begin to look like pictures pulled away from the surface, leaving the outline of an object such as a fire hydrant or an animal wandering across an open window.

Robert Rauschenberg, Driveway Detour (Night Shade), 1991

I also kept hearing the images. The sounds of aluminium are always loud, and wandering through the exhibition, the clanking of machines, cranking of mechanisms, the movement of pistons in Nightshades in particular consume the gallery spaces. In this they reminded me of Bruce Baillie's Castro Street. The Phantom images, on the other hand, whisper. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Drums (Night Shade), 1991

Indeed, the multi-sensory evocations of Rasuchenberg's work are what ensure that they are not outdated; the images are so much more than representative of a moment in history when the industrial and the natural did battle over the same environment without consciousness. Rauschenberg's ability to make metal so eloquent and nuanced is another among the many reasons for the works' ongoing potency.

Alberto Giacometti, L'Homme qui Marche, Fondation Giacometti @ 5, Rue Victor Schoelcher

Alberto Giacometti in his studio

With very few exhibitions in the summer months, as I often do in August, I visited a permanent collection that I didn't previously know. The Fondation Giacometti opened in 2018, following the transposition of Giacometti's studio to a newly renovated building, two down from Simone de Beauvoir's residence on the periphery of the Cimitère de Montparnasse. 

The small space is beautifully laid out with Giacometti's tiny reconstructed studio - including the walls themselves - just inside the door on the ground floor. Visitors to the 2009 exhibition at the Pompidou Center will recognize the grafittied walls and messy space. The studio is interesting not just for what it shows us about Giacometti and his way of working, but also for its peek into postwar Paris. The tiny, windowless studio reminds us of a time when Paris was populated by people of all different classes, not as it is today, overrun with the urban well-to-do. Giacometti worked in a 20 square meter space with no running water, electricity, or other creature comforts. It was at a time when artists and writers sat in restaurants, brasseries, cafes with friends. For Giacometti, these included his brother Diego, philosophers such as Sartre, and of course, all the girlfriends. There is so little space in the studio that Alberto would have done little other than sculpt, paint, draw and think. Even though there was a bed in the corner, the rickety old frame with a thin mattress could not have been conducive to long, restful sleep.

As I have written elsewhere, this is a body of work that is all about being trapped - by the body, by the Giacometti cage, the stages on which the figures are standing, sitting, the frames of the paintings. This sense of being enclosed and incarcerated is encapsulated by the minimal space of the studio, leaving cramped and cluttered working spaces. Looking at the studio and accompanying photos, it's easy to imagine how difficult it was to pass between the stool and the table as both were permanently covered with tools, plaster remnants, bits of wire and other treasures. Just like the figures who are are stuck to their plinths, going nowhere, Giacometti must have been wedged in place as he created.

Alberto Giacometti, Interior, 1954-57

And yet, as we reflect on the art, and particularly, the drawings on the upper floor, we see the dynamism and motion that continues to propel the artist's mind and his art. The sketches reveal a man who was always thinking, drawing, doodling, going over and over again, scraping away, erasing through adding another layer. In addition, the unfinished-ness of so many of the works, Giacometti's inability to let the works go off into a life of their own, contributes to the image of an artist whose mind was in constant motion. 

Alberto Giacometti, Walking Man I, Walking Man II, Walking Man III
Installation View

I have always been awed by Giacometti's work because it is so wildly different from what everyone else was doing around him in his postwar moment. Giacometti was engaged in a process of taking away, always removing, whittling the body down to its most fundamental shape, emphasized by the curvature of the spine, the form of the figure, no flesh, just form. In a realization of the very opposite, I saw at the Fondation how committed he was to Egyptian and Greek sculptural form. For example, in the three Walking Man sculptures, we see the ultimate expressions and explorations of form as they move from erect to bending forward at the hips. Yes, seeing the three in a series, we appreciate the bronze figure propelled into walking motion, but most radically, the figures represent a striding away from the principles of classical sculptural form into a walking figure of experimentation whose body is less than perfect, unsure of itself, unfinished, and yet, still stuck on its plinth,

Turner. Paintings and Watercolours from the Tate @ Musée Jacquemart-André

J M W Turner, The Lagoon Near Venice, at Sunset, 1840

The Turner exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André is a pleasure from beginning to end. People used to visiting the intimate rooms of this museum will welcome the current social distancing measures. Never before have I had the opportunity to be alone, or at worst, with one or two others in the room. It was a treat. 

J M W Turner, Blair Atholl, Looking towards Killiecrankie, 1801-2

From the beginning we see Turner painting the weather, the time of day, the seasons, the elements as they are reflected in the air. We see the wind blowing in paint. In those moments that would make Turner's work so controversial in his time, in the places where he left the canvas bare, we see some of his most emotional moments. The watercolours follow Turner's ongoing preoccupation with light, seeing him working over and over to illuminate the whole painting from a single source. Even from the beginning, it is clear that Turner is not interested in objects or human figures, even narrative. They are diminished, overwhelmed by the weather, the natural environment and, of course, colour as light. Turner never goes so far as to remove the human figures altogether, he can't quite take us to a point where he eschews representation, but in the watercolours and eventually the oil paintings, we can see the beginnings of abstraction in art. In Blair Atholl, vue en direction de Killicranckie, vers 1801-02, for example, streaks of light, clouds blown in the wind, their shadows, the gentle movement of water, animate the paper surface. 

J M W Turner, Venice: San Giorgio Maggiore - Early Morning, 1819

Then Turner travels to Venice. Like so many artists throughout history, Venice changes everything for Turner. In Venice he sees the light, humidity and the sultry atmosphere reflected in the lagoon in Venise: San Giorgio Maggiore-tot le matin, 1819. In Venice, thanks to the water, Turner learns about luminosity, transparency and he manages to capture the something essential that he has been looking for. Venice marks the shift to abstraction. In front of the Venice paintings, we realize that the water helps him to discover new depths to the relationship between colour and light. Twenty five years later when he goes back to Venice on his world travels, in a work such as Venise: une vue imaginaire de l'Arsenal  vers 1840, the heat, the lethargy, the heaviness of the Venetian atmosphere is everywhere expressed in the orange and yellow of the sun-scorched buildings and their reflections. The straw-like lines of the boats, Gondalas, moorings and processions, indistinct from their reflections in the blue water of La Piazzetta avec la céremonie du Doge époussant la mer, vers 1835 cry out to the viewer, as if we are there, participating in the festivities. The sounds, colours, the air, wind and sun are more important than any figures we might be able to be identified. 

J M W Turner, Yacht Approaching the Coast (1840-45)

In the final room of the exhibition we see some of his finest oil paintings. Most interesting is their continued reach for abstraction. The line between sea and shore has become an idea, something that is no longer clearly defined in the image. In works such as Yacht Approaching the Coast, we see the signature of Turner's late oil on canvas paintings: the pulling of the viewer into the vortex of an agitated sea. If Venice guides Turner to the marriage of painted colour and light, it's the seascape at Margate that ultimately leads him to the near dissolution of form and the blurring of all structuring sight lines in painting. 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude @ Centre Pompidou

Christo, Package, 1960

As thrilling as it was to be back in a museum after four months of "culture online," I was disappointed by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. My vivid memories of the 2001 exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau are overwhelmed with a sense of discovery. Learning how and where (artistically speaking) Christo began his career was an eye-opening experience. My expectations for the Pompidou exhibition were for a similarly exhaustive study of Christo's slow developing brilliance. Prior to the Martin Gropius Bau exhibition, I had known him as someone who wraps buildings and hangs curtains across vast stretches of land. Then to discover Christo's body of work to be so intricately woven together with the history of western art was revelatory. This sense of surprise is nowhere to be found in the Pompidou exhibition.

Christo, Wrapped Oil Barrels, 1958-69

In the early rooms, we see Christo's earliest works made in Paris in which he starts preserving paper and fabric with lacquer and paint. They create a connection with Dubuffet and Fontana, particularly in their materiality of perceived degradation and preservation. Already, in 1958, the packing surfaces, whether paper or fabric, engage the artist's lifelong obsession with concealing and revealing. Whether we are looking at a piece of fabric as an art work placed in a frame, or a wrapped object, we oscillate between admiring the packaging that conceals and imagining the object behind or inside. Either there is no possibility of knowing—thus we don't even try to guess—what is the inside the fabric wrapping, or we know exactly what it is, in the case of the oil barrels, a half-wrapped, chair, portrait paintings in which we see faces through the dirty but clear plastic wrapping. 

Christo, Wrapped Telephone, 1962

There is no denying that politics are wrapped around each object. Even if politics are denied or claimed to be unintended by the artists themselves. How can oil barrels blocking the passageway through a Paris street to echo the erection of the Berlin Wall not be a statement on disrupting the effects of capitalism? The wrapping of objects must also surely be about consumption. Objects are presented as gifts, things of value, things that need to be preserved, or at times, exchanged, protected. On occasion, the wrapping reminds us of butcher's paper around meat, especially when the string so tightly constricts the expansion and contraction of the object. Hanging Package from 1962, dangling on the end of a rope reminds us of a carcass, hung up to dry. Some viewers may recall  Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox (1655) before Hanging Package. Art and the dead animal are one and the same; they are both dead objects on display for all to ogle at. 

Christo, Show Case, 1963

As Christo continues on his Parisian journey, the work becomes increasingly sophisticated, complicated, and somehow more beautiful. In some of the most exquisite, layered and politically cutting works, a room halfway through the exhibition is filled with vitrines and storefronts. These are multilayered, with references to multiple events in the history of art. We are immediately reminded of Matisse's window paintings and Duchamp's Fresh Window, 1920. From Matisse, Christo continues the push towards abstraction, breaking down the boundary between the real and the illusory, finding the forms and materials and structures of painting in the everyday world. And from Duchamp, Christo extends all of the significance of consumerism, of displays designed to tempt buying, not just art, but all other objects that sparkle in shop windows. However, as in Duchamp's Fresh Window, we are prohibited from window shopping, here because the butcher's paper covers the window, or a hessian cloth stymies our looking. Unlike Christo's wrapped objects, the windows contain things we want to see, the object itself is not enough. The light behind the butcher's paper or hessian cloth draws our curiosity. We peer in, trying to see what it is we missing out on. Again, the game of concealing and revealing is made more complex here as the viewer is persistently tempted to see and to know, but always struggles to do so.  

Christo and Jeanne Claude, Purple Store Front, 1964

Thus, the vitrines and storefronts are about looking, but also about blindness, or our inability to see. Simultaneously, the store fronts engage discourses of looking at -- they are, after all, two dimensional objects placed on a wall, as if they are paintings, even though they are not. By extension, they blur even more boundaries; not only between art and everyday objects, but between painting and sculpture, between the conceptual and the aesthetic object of art. 

Christo, Pont Neuf Wrapped, 1980

The remainder of the exhibition is given over to the drawings, maquettes, plans, collages, documents and other objects from the project to wrap the Pont Neuf. Included is a screening of the Maysles Brothers film, Christo in Paris from 1990. Of course, the film is interesting for its documentation of the struggle to realize the project against the backdrop of changing Paris political landscapes (and Mayors). However, as is often the case with exhibitions that document past artistic events, the memory is not quite as exciting as it would have been to walk across the wrapped bridge during its brief existence in 1985. 

Christian Boltanski, Life in the Making @ Pompidou

Christian Boltanski, Depart,  Life in the Making

There will be no surprises in this exhibition for visitors familiar with Christian Boltanski's work. Boltanski is an artist who has been preoccupied with similar issues for fifty years, and he found a language in which to express those ideas very early in his career. Moreover, since the 1990s, the innovation has not always been in the works themselves, but in the way the installations are exhibited. In fact, the most interesting iterations of his work have often been the unique and interesting spaces of exhibition. 

Christian Boltanski, Les Regards, 2011

On entering Life in the Making on the top floor of the Centre Pompidou, I felt as though I was entering a mausoleum. The temporary exhibition walls are painted a dark grey, the lighting of Boltanski's black and white images is minimal, if it exists at all, and the mechanically sounding heart beat - no doubt the artist's own - drums through the entire space. To the point where the presence of the thumping heartbeat becomes subliminal, working on a deeper level of consciousness, underlying every step, and no doubt, leading to headaches for some visitors. As we move through the exhibition spaces, the black and white family photographs lining the walls plunge us into the familiar Boltanski world of memory, pathos and hopelessness. Given the sounds and images, I was puzzled by the exhibition's title, Life in the Making. Because nothing here resembles life in the present, in the making, or the pleasure of simply being alive. Rather, in familiar Boltanski fashion, everything points to death.

Christian Boltanski, Autel Chases, 1987

An enormous pile of black clothes, le Terril Grand-Hornu, 2015 resembles the charred remains of the unfortunate people to whom they might once have belonged. A single electrical light bulb hangs above the tip of the pile, barely illuminating the signifiers of death below. It's impossible to see any kind of life after death inside this dark, depressing world. Even when death is far from the work, it's memory haunts our thoughts and imaginations. Thus, for example, in his well known use of images of school children, in a work such as Après in which photographs show anonymous faces of girls smiling as they play in Hamburgerstrasse in Berlin, the blown up, indistinct, anonymous faces printed on very thin, torn veils are haunted by the fact that the girls must be dead. The children may not be  dead, but Boltanski reproduces their portraits in such a way that they remind us of ID photographs of Holocaust victims, or sufferers of other kinds of violence; they are votives encouraging us to mourn.  

Christian Boltanski, Prendre la Parole, 2005

Or in the row upon row of columns made from rusted steel boxes, each with a small photograph on its front, we cannot help but imagine that each box contains the ashes of the person depicted or naming the box. Or perhaps their valuables have been placed in the box, as if in a vault, for safekeeping. Either way, there is no suggestion that anyone is coming back to collect their belongings. 

Christian Boltanski, Les Registres du Grand-Hornu
1997

Boltanski grew up with a father who, as a Russian Jew, had escaped deportation by hiding underneath the floorboards for over a year. The profound effect this had on Boltanski's father is potentially taken up throughout the son's art across decades. The icons and symbols of the death camps are everywhere recognizeable, even if they are not present, in the works: piles of clothes, great numbers of blurred, anonymous faces with blackened-out eyes in photographs printed on flimsy cloths, black mirrors and veils, as well as sound installations that evoke practices of witnessing death and trauma. Of course, the exhibition and the museum are now closed in keeping with the government shutdown. However, should further reiterations of Life in the Making be staged elsewhere, Boltanski's work might just be seen as an omen for the end of the world that appears to be approaching through the silent city streets of our time. 

Daniel Arsham, Paris, 3020 @ Perrotin Paris

Daniel Arsham, Blue Calcite Eroded Moses, 2019

Daniel Arsham's eroded sculptures reproduce some of the world's great sculptural treasures, and is the perfect exhibition to see on return from a trip to Rome. The young American artist apparently gained access to the French molding atelier, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux - Grand Palais, that reproduces masterpieces for Europe's major encyclopeadic museums. Using the same molds and scans, Arsham casts perfect replicas of famous sculptures in hydrostone, a kind of uncoated terracotta clay. He then chisels erosions into the sculpture, exposing crystals of blue calcite, selenite, and quartz. The result is figures that are both disintegrating and, simultaneously, showing their mode of construction. They are both eroding and revealing their increased value, icons whose infinite reproduction and copying is in itself as much a cultural phenomenon as the object itself.

Daniel Arsham, Blue Calcite Eroded Melpomene, 2019

Having just returned from Rome, I couldn't help thinking of the gallery upon gallery of cultural riches at the Vatican museums. The endless rows of heads, animals, ancient gods and then the tapestries, paintings and sculptures acquired by each pope, adding to those already amassed from the previous one in the Vatican museums are the ultimate glut of accumulated objects. These collections that announce, "this is mine, I own it," is both the subject of Arsham's laughter and his critique of our readiness to consume everything in sight. On the one hand, the artist is showing the way that these relics are crumbling and disintegerating thanks to our unrelenting idolization, and on the other hand, with the sparkle of the precious crystalline stones discovered inside the objects, they are offered up to be further revered.

Daniel Arsham, Rose Quartz Eroded Venus de Milo, 2019

It is striking to notice that Arsham is doing the same thing with each of his reproduced statues.There is no differentiation between them, other than of course their form. But they are all the same material, they all go through the same process. To the point where, once we have seen one of these objects, we have seen them all. Nothing new is revealed by moving on to the next one. Except of course the fact that the repetition is itself a comment on the practices and processes of reproduction and adoration. The repetition might trivialize these great works of art, but it also gives them value. Furthermore, Arsham comments on our own behaviour in museums as both diminishing and elevating the value of objects on display. Rather than examining the work for its artistic qualities, we move to the next one, asking "who is it," ignoring its aesthetic qualities and historical significance in preference for  "spotting the great work of art." 

Daniel Arsham, Ash and Pyrite Eroded Head of Lucille, 2019

Arsham titles the exhibition, Paris 3020, in a clear gesture towards the future of these relics. In 1000 years, the art lovers of Paris will be traipsing off to see the works, even as they disintegrate and lose all materiality. And yet, Arsham is also surely critiquing the present. These are the past works idealized in the present, made over and over and over again, not just by the RMN, but in the form of miniatures, key rings, light shades, and the list goes on. They are also reproduced in every material - metal and plastic being the most popular. We can never get enough of the iconic treasures of yesterday.

Daniel Arsham, Paris, 3020
Installation View @ Perrotin Paris

Arsham's work typically represents the decay of the objects and icons that we blow out of proportion through our adoration: footballs, computers and televisions, for example. All of these objects have a lifespan that makes them immanently disposable - at least that's what he draws attention to. But when those objects are centuries' old museum statues that are being reproduced for encyclopeadic museums, they take on a whole new dimension. Arsham's works become about collection, exhibition and reproduction, and in turn, how each of these practices diminish and exaggerate the value, destroy and recreate the importance of art. 

Y Z Kami, Night Paintings, Gagosian Rome

Y Z Kami, Night Paintings
Installation View @ Gagosian, Rome

As a way to mitigate the inevitable overwhelm of history, culture, architecture, and art in Rome, I always visit one place, or do one thing that I haven't done before. After four days of looking at ancient, medieval and renaissance art last week, I headed for Gagosian's Rome gallery, just behind the Spanish Steps. This glorious space is not just a haven from the buzz of the streets, but stepping into a contemporary art exhibition brought relief from the layer upon layer of history that makes up the palimpsestic city. The clarity of the light flooded space, together with Kami's indigo and white paintings offer reprieve from the weight of history all around.

Y Z Kami, Night Painting 2 (For William Blake), 2017-2018

Contributing to the already obscure, floating shapes of the Night Painting series, Kami works with oil on linen, producing works on which the ill-defined shapes seem to float. I wondered for a long time what I was looking at. But Kami manages to obscure the abstract to the point where the white gradations and forms don't resemble anything in the everyday world. Almost resembling forms under the sea, perhaps under a microscope, in a gaseous state, or even x-ray images, the forms are always out of reach, never quite discernible.

Y Z Kami, The Great Swan, 2018

Also on display are two paintings from The Great Swan series. These two larger works are striking for the black veil that comes down over the figures, obscuring parts of their bodies and heads. The paintings of Hindu mystics surrounded by rapt worshippers may have figures, but like the Night Paintings, it is impossible to say what is happening in the image. The eclipsing of the top half of each painting effectively cancels out the hints of figuration underneath. Though we may be tempted to ascribe a political or social significance to the scenes of The Great Swan paintings, whether their discourse is on greatness, or worship of idols, or the other worldliness of the prophet, in the end, the blurring of the faces and obscuring of the scene, renders all meaning, once again, out of reach. Thus, in the end, as much as Kami's paintings gesture towards the larger significance, they remain enigmatic.