The Shape of a Pocket

true, this may give a false impression of
wilfulness.
In fact these painters in their old age simply became more receptive, more open to the appeal of the ‘model’ and its strange energy. It is as if their own bodies fall away.
    When once the principle of collaboration has been understood, it becomes a criterion for judging works of any style, irrespective of their freedom of handling. Or rather (because
judgement
has little to do with art) it offers us an insight for seeing more clearly why painting moves us.
    Rubens painted his beloved Hélène Fourment many times. Sometimes she collaborated, sometimes not. When she didn’t, she remains a painted ideal; when she did, we too wait for her. There is a painting of roses in a vase by Morandi (1949) in which the flowers wait like cats to be let into his vision. (This is very rare for most flower paintings remain pure spectacle.) There is a portrait of a man painted on wood two millennia ago, whose participation we still feel. There are dwarfs painted by Velazquez, dogs by Titian, houses by Vermeer in which we recognise, as energy, the will-to-be-seen.
    More and more people go to museums to look at paintings and do not come away disappointed. What fascinates them? To answer: Art, or the history of art, or art appreciation, misses, I believe, the essential.
    In art museums we come upon the visible of other periods and it offers us company. We feel less alone in face of what we ourselves see each day appearing and disappearing. So much continues to look the same: teeth, hands, the sun, women’s legs, fish … in the realm of the visible all epochs coexist and are fraternal, whether separated by centuries or millennia. And when the painted image is not a copy but the result of a dialogue, the painted thing speaks if we listen.
    In matters of seeing Joseph Beuys was the great prophet of the second half of our century, and his life’s work was a demonstration of, and an appeal for, the kind of collaboration I’m talking about. Believing that everybody is potentially an artist, he took objects and arranged them in such a way that they beg the spectator to collaborate with them, not this time by painting, but by listening to what their eyes tell them and remembering.
    I know of few things more sad (sad, not tragic) than an animal who has lost its sight. Unlike humans, the animal has no supporting language left which can describe the world. If on a familiar terrain, the blind animal manages to find its way about with its nose. But it has been deprived of the existent and with this deprivation it begins to diminish until it does little but sleep, therein perhaps hunting for a dream of that which once existed.
    The Marquise de Sorcy de Thélusson, painted in 1790 by David, looks at me. Who could have foreseen in her time the solitude in which people today live? A solitude confirmed daily by networks of bodiless and false images concerning the world. Yet their falseness is not an error. If the pursuit of profit is considered as the only means of salvation for mankind, turnover becomes the absolute priority, and, consequently, the existent has to be disregarded or ignored or suppressed.
    Today, to try to paint the existent is an act of resistance instigating hope.



3
Studio Talk
( for Miguel Barceló )

    A scrap of paper crumpled up and thrown on the studio floor amongst unstretched canvases, on which you stand, pails of pigment – some mixed with clay, the odd saucepan, broken sticks of charcoal, rags, discarded drawings, two empty cups. On the scrap of paper are written two words: FACE and PLACE.
    The studio was once a bicycle factory, no? You work here in your painting shoes and clothes. The shirt and trousers were originally striped. Now, like the shoes, they are encrusted with pigment. So I picture you as two people: a man about to ride away on his bicycle and a convict.
    However, the only thing which matters, when the day is done, is what lies painted on the floor or leaning against the walls, waiting to be seen the next day. What matters is what the changing light can never quite reveal – the thing, to which one is nearest, when one fears one has probably lost it.
    Face.
Whatever the painter is looking for, he’s looking for its face. All the search and the losing and the re-finding is about that, isn’t it? And ‘its face’ means what? He’s looking for its return gaze and he’s looking for its expression – a slight sign of its inner life. And this is true