This post serves, I hope, as a good bridge between my time in Berlin and the next few weeks that I will spend in Italy. I am writing it in Bologna about an Italian artist, Nicola Samorì, who studied here and whose work I saw the day before I left Berlin.  His show, Guarigione Dell’Ossesso at Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, was described to me as perfect baroque-style paintings that the artist then destroys so it naturally piqued my interest. 

And what destruction! The paintings are gouged, pierced, flecked, scratched, scrunched, shrouded and pummeled. The act of their destruction being all the more perverse because it is carried out on paintings which have been carefully rendered with art historical references and technique. I imagine the artist labouriously painting for weeks or maybe months, building up layer upon layer of paint, and then one day turning around and destroying these creations in which he has invested so much. The gallery’s press release states that Samorì examines obsession, one aspect of which is the obsession of the artist with his own work. Yet he is neither an artist who is precious about his paintings, nor a Victor Frankenstein, who seeks to destroy because he is horrified by what he has created. Far from it, he then puts his destroyed masterpieces on display. His paintings both refer to the past through their subject matter and the manner in which they are depicted, and are rooted in the contemporary, by their very recent act of destruction. 

I was first drawn to Vomere, a copper-surfaced diptych, peppered by oval forms, the heads of an audience who are looking at a painted figure forming a table in front of them. This life-size figure is in the process of being physically dissected, a process we may have interrupted. The skin of paint has been half pushed and pulled away, echoing the fragile surface covering our bodies. But rather than revealing bones, muscles and tendons, we see a black and blank undersurface. Pulling the surface away hides rather than enlightens and we, like the unseen copper-covered faces of the curious in the diptych, are left un-seeing. 

Sotto gli occhi la forma stanca, 2013, repeats the act of dissection, scrunching up the surface of a Christ-like portrait. Displayed horizontally we look down upon to it, as though in a coffin, invoking pity for the recent fate it has suffered at the hands of the artist. If google is right, the title translates into English as ‘under the eyes of the tired form’ suggesting a rebellious compulsion from the artist rather than a desire to revere the tradition and history in which he works. For me this painting makes reference to formal qualities, to the deception of real life that paintings seek to invoke, when in reality they are pigment, medium and supporting surface. In the past, paintings were commissioned to invoke devotion, loyalty and awe. Something which they achieved more or less successfully through their ability to deceive, allowing the viewer to forget the reality of what was before their eyes. And so Samorì’s destruction is like a magician revealing his tricks, destroying the illusion. 

A group of four small portraits seem to me to reveal a different intent in their destruction. These faces sit on surfaces of paint inches thick, built up over time, then distorted by gouging, scrunching or shriveled from the weight of drying oil paint. Those surfaces where the paint has been infiltrated reveal bright colours which do not feature on the austere restrained final portraits. Where do these colours come from? Were the portraits painted in a lighter style; beneath the surface do they show the sitter in different times, styles or a completely different image? In this the traces that are shown are like the compositional changes which X-rays of masterpieces expose, changes which those artists wanted to hide but which Samorì hints at. It is as though the paintings have started to reveal the history of either their sitter, beneath their formal pose, or of their making.  Samorì’s exhibition title translates as ‘healing the obsessed’ but these paintings generated more obsession for me through the intrigue the under-layers create in my mind, the potential histories which lie beneath the surface. 

I wonder what constitutes a good act of destruction for Samorì? The act of destruction that he carries out is full of conviction. They feel like singular actions: actions that cannot be repeated or remediated, although they may be pondered and plotted by the artist long before they are carried out. At art school I remember a tutor telling me that the artist Angela De La Cruz, who similarly disrupts her paintings, at times felt she had gone too far and she would then try to bring her paintings back from the brink of destruction. In her case this may be easier as she focuses on destroying the support for her paintings, which reference minimalist and colour-field painting, the canvas stretcher. Maybe Samorì’s destruction is closer to the tense balance that Alexis Harding seeks to create in his paintings where colour and form slide, sometimes hanging precariously from the support but never quite slipping off. 

It may seem strange to link these painters together as their work references very different eras and, so, outwardly appears entirely distinct. However, I think they have commonalities in their underlying intent, and in the use of destruction as part of their creative process. By grounding his work in a more distant art historical past, Samorì displays a technical virtuoso that the other artists do not. For me, this adds a rich drama to his work and makes the final act of destruction all the more powerful.   


Guarigione Dell’Ossesso by Nicola Samorì was at Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin, from 25 October to 7 December. With thanks to the gallery for providing me with photographs from the exhibition to use in this blog.

This post was first published in my Reside Residency blog.  

After years of making stark, minimalist work I have become an unashamed romantic. So I have spent time these past few months looking at the work of Caspar David Friedrich, taking advantage of the fact that so many of his paintings are here in Germany. I have been to Greifswald, a small town on the Baltic coast to see where he was born, and I have travelled to Dresden where he lived for most of his life. I have attempted to read – in German - about his life and his work. My practice is very different to his on many fundamental levels: in its appearance, method and motivation. Yet there are, I feel, similarities of intent and, more importantly, things that I would like to learn from his paintings to enrich what I do. 

His work is easily identifiable, as popular images used to represent the Romantic era.  But my observation, as I have sat in museums and sketched or written, is that people don’t spend very long looking at them once they have linked image and artist. This may be because many people don’t actually spend very long looking at any art, but perhaps it is also because his paintings are too earnest and sentimental for our contemporary eyes, the colours, particularly of sunrise and sunset, now too clichéd and cloying. Looking past the vivid orange sky and contrasting lilac mountains I have found these seemingly straightforward paintings are created from complex compositions and unusual perspectives which hide as much as they reveal.

Going to Greifswald was surprising. I was expecting a grand landscape to have inspired the painter to his life’s work (although he did some interior and street scenes the majority of his paintings are land and seascapes). Instead it was a pretty mix of fields and ditches interspersed with small copses and villages; in other words, nothing spectacular. My train ride home was accompanied by a Friedrich-esque sunset, below, which brought some of the motifs he used to life and asserted the dominance of the sky. In this we share a similar influence, as I grew up near the Cambridgeshire Fens where the land is flat and the skies wide open. I am drawn to similar open views and since 2011 have been drawing them, repeating landscape forms until the image becomes abstracted.

For Friedrich, as for other Romantics of his era, the beauty of nature represented the power and benevolence of God. There is a real tenderness in his paintings that evokes this sentiment and which I feel comes from his focus on detail throughout the image - lovingly recreating each leaf on a tree as in Gartenterrasse at the Neuer Pavillion in Berlin or branch on a tree as in Gebüsch im Schnee(probably my favourite of all the Friedrich paintings I have seen, for its very simple subject matter) in the Albertinum in Dresden - and a sense that they have been produced under quiet contemplation. While I do not see nature in this way I can still appreciate the awe of nature, the power of God having been replaced in my eyes by the wonder of the forces of evolution and erosion. In choosing to draw landscapes, from the detail of weeds to distant views of mountains, I am also retreating from the encroaching urbanisation of contemporary life in much the same way that the Romantics turned their backs on the first signs of the industrial revolution infiltrating into nature. Look carefully at a Friedrich landscape and you will see signs of life - figures in the shade of trees as in Der einsame Baum, below, houses clinging to the hillside – but these people do not belong to the giddy rush of civilising progress that was happening at the time. 

Friedrich believed that a painter should paint not only what they see in front of them but what they feel within, and if they feel nothing then they shouldn’t paint at all[1]. He sketched a lot in the open and then waited until a composition came to him, collaged together from his observations of nature, before putting it down on canvas, methodically in his studio. Das brennende Neubrandenburg, below, shows the clear, confident ink drawing to which Friedrich started adding glazes of oil paint but never finished. The atmospheric effects in his work may have come from memory, or an oil sketch of clouds attributed to him in the Pommersches Landesmusuem implies he also captured weather effects to use later. While I draw from nature, I work very differently, allowing an image to evolve from sketches I make from nature, not always knowing what the next step will be and never having a final composition in mind. However, I am drawn to the idea of collaging together sketches to form an ideal landscape and can imagine that this would be a good strategy for creating, now as I travel and also when I return to juggling art and paid work. I would like these sketches to invoke some of the tender detail of Friedrich’s work. 

The thing that draws me to seek out Friedrich’s paintings again and again, and above other landscape painters, is the drama and inventiveness of their composition. They seem so simple, but from attempting to sketch them I now know what I must have instinctively perceived, their skillful complexity. 

I feel that they really play with me, as a viewer. In some cases frustrating my view, hiding as much as they reveal. Rocks rise up in the centre of the picture, as in Das Kreuz im Gebirge, The effects of light or weather are employed to obscure the view. The landscapes of Ziehende Wolken, above, and Nebel im Elbtal are partially shrouded in mist, with the viewer receiving only fleeting glimpses of the valley below in the latter painting. In some pictures the foreground is cast into gloom making it difficult to discern any detail.  With this latter obstructing effect, however, I am unclear whether Friedrich intended it to act as strongly as it does or whether it is the combined effect of the museum lighting, glazing and darkening varnish on the works. 

The composition directs the way in which we navigate through the elements of the painting. A path or river directing the way in which we move from fore to mid to background. Strong vertical, horizontal or diagonals attracting our attention at the expense of small details such as the shepherd tending his flock in Der einsame Baum, as I mentioned before (above), or a sailing boat about to ground itself in the shallow river in Das Grosse Gehege bei Dresden. These details only revealed themselves to me as I stopped and really contemplated the pictures. 

Friedrich also used changes in perspective to direct attention to particular elements of the composition. In some cases the picture is uniformly detailed, performing a feat the eye cannot manage, of presenting the background to the same level of detail as the foreground, flattening away pictorial illusion. A picture such as Eichbaum im Schnee, below, focuses on a single tree, obscuring anything but the foreground. While the composition and detail of Wiesen bei Greifswald focuses on the background of the town of Greifswald, with the foreground of bushes and mid-ground of horses and geese in a meadow, seemingly incidental, decorative elements for the main image. Copses or rock formations serve as formal markers between fore, mid and background, setting the scene out as though in a theatre-set stage.

I mentioned at the start of this post that romantic influences have crept into my own work recently. I hope that you can see from previous posts that both my subject matter of recent months, landscape and particularly, weeds, and the heightened colouring I use reference the romantic. I would also like to learn from Friedrich’s compositions. I have no doubt that he carefully thought through the complexity of his paintings, either as he constructed them in his mind or as he put them down on canvas. I don’t want to directly reference his work and I will have to achieve this in a different way as I work more directly. I plan to directly collage together different sketches to create a complex composition and play with perspective. The act of looking at Friedrich’s paintings, sketching from them and now writing about them has been very useful in giving me ideas as to how to add complexity to my work. I will know when I have mastered this when I can also make my work appear as deceptively simple as his paintings do.  

[1] The Abstract Sublime, Robert Rosenblum, Arts News, February 1961


This post was first published on my Reside Residency blog