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 That said, there is nothing outdated about Night Shades and Phantoms, and neither are they any less mesmerizing than they were in the 1990s.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.