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Tthe house seems to be set up for a party. Unmatched furniture is scattered in the air – a beautiful gothic throne, a winged chair, a regular school chair. Each one points to a white painted window on the wall, in which 43 different paintings are placed. These pictures are some of the guests at the party, and you have to choose who you will be with.
It’s a ragtag group, and I decided to start with people I recognize. But I’m going to meet a picture Denzil Forrester of the young Haile Selassie, its surface like polished and polished stone, I am disturbed by the glimmer of light from the small work done. Andrew Cranston. It comes from a girl who seems to have left Dumbarton pretty late Vuillardhis coat glistening like the scales of a fish caught in the late summer sun. So I took a leather chair in front of him, and was fascinated by his story of a beatnik family that had a dream of being polluted at the end of the summer, the woman looking directly at me, on her lover sitting, through the veil of the shadow.
When I stopped, my eye was caught by the sweet autumnal appearance of the landscape created by the elders Merlin JamesWhat makes me draw so amazing is Margot Bergman that lies between surrealism and what the US curator Lynne Cook has called “alien” art. This surprising juxtaposition shows, first of all, that the artists in this exhibition are somewhat connected to the painting process and a similar connection. There are some unusual jazz musicians, a good night in a mental hospital, a former manager of the Clash, names like Gillian Carnegie, Hey Donachie and Bill Lynch which will please any fan of modern art with names that will not appear even to the hardcore.
The director of this “salon”, is a man whose cunning is compatible with Matthew Higgs, director of New York’s White Columns gallery and magpie impresario. Some of these artists have worked with him for many years, while others, such as Adam Kayiwho contribute wonderfully to the coastal landscape, were invited by chance to meet them. The drawings are presented with no reason to be here except that the organizer believes they will contribute to the discussion. In a context of the art world being able to disguise itself as a quasi-academic discourse to hide the fact that it is structured and connected to the public, this is unexpectedly refreshing. It is refreshing to realize that the exhibition will not be a story about a natural disaster or a male problem, as if no one who enters the museum can read a book, but just a group of artists who have their own stories.
Some give them up more easily than others. I had to stay for years Mike SilvaA beautiful photo of a houseplant exposed to the sun before the stem merges into a yellow and crimson shape in the water as the painting recreates itself. But the main point of the show is that if you look at anything long enough, something will be revealed. To understand this point, step away from the story, set a timer on your phone, and look at one corner of the room you’re sitting in until you cry. Things got weird, didn’t they? Next time you’re in a museum, do the same with a painting.
If you can stick to 40 minutes that’s when things really get going psychedelic, you will find that you have attracted the attention of the guards. This is because exhibitions are not designed to encourage you to spend long periods of time in front of art that will lead you to the gift shop. But Higgs understood that having a sound and artistic experience required no technical expertise but only time, an open mind, and a chair.
So I can stay a long time, here, with a Stephen McKenna cloudscape that transforms from a system of pigments into a world of feeling in which I can fall. It doesn’t always work. I spend my spare time drawing Walter Pricewhose work I admire elsewhere, and I find that this one does not speak to me. So I change the seat, and try my luck with someone else. If you instantly like everyone at the party, after all, you’re at the wrong party. And this salon, too, is interesting not because its guests are very similar but because they are different from each other and everything else.
The word “salon” also includes exhibitions that the French Academy used to encourage artists who worked in an official style. If the educational art of the 1900s was expressed by paintings of scantily clad women and beautiful ordinary people, then the educational art of today, as shown in the games and biennial meetings, was also designed to support productive learning by giving opportunities to their codes and skills by describing the specifics of what happened. That it can take the form of an installation or a video game doesn’t make it any less.
Beginning in the 1860s, several independent salons began to support artists who wanted to speak more directly to their audience than academics allowed. These artists (Manet, Cézanne, Whistler, Seurat, Van Gogh, etc.) were dismissed by the authorities as backward and unchanging, yet they prepared the foundations of the modern era. It is to Higgs’ great credit that his salon is of that unruly nature.
