A central theme of these notes is thinking through and thinking with: searching out and identifying fragments, frames, clues, people, texts: whatever might assist in reckoning with our collective conditions. We need partners, collaborators, aids and inspirations. With that in mind, this note engages with a series of artists and artworks, classical and contemporary, centred around a recent Europe trip.
At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a number of Rembrandt paintings were illuminated by Christopher Neve’s wonderful, Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague, which he offers not a ‘straightforward art history but as something half understood’. Considering the changes in Rembrandt’s artwork brought through years of tragedy and troubles, Neve suggests that, ‘his own suffering and that of his family enables him at last to come close in the most mysterious way to expressing the very essence of what it is to be human.’ He focuses on the painting known as ‘The Jewish Bride’ (1665–1669), completed at the end of Rembrandt’s life: ‘out of a time of illness, worry and loss comes the indescribable beauty of those hands’.
Reflecting on how Rembrandt’s late style appeared in his portraits, Neve writes:
The portraits must show the demeanour of the sitter as well as their facial expression and social status, and the objects in their room. But now there is something more. What seems to interest Rembrandt is something that lies behind, the part he cannot see. His way with light, his smudging and erasing, the awkward hesitations and rapid touches, the unorthodox way in which he rubs ink off the etching plate with the side of his hand. All this begins to hint at the person within, the inner life of the sitter, the shadowy character trapped somewhere out of sight.
Moving to Brussels, at Bozar I was fortunate to again see Richard Mosse’s works, Broken Spectre and Tristes Tropiques, which capture the destruction of the Amazon in terrible, terrifying beauty. I’ve been planning on writing about Mosse’s for some time, hopefully I will do so, for now some brief thoughts on these works. The pair of images below (© Richard Mosse) are stills from the 74 minute film, Broken Spectre, that captures the brutal and brutalising logic of extractivism that reached new extremes during Bolsonaro’s presidency.
The manner in which the film is shown across multiple screens - combined with Ben Frost’s remarkable score - overpowers the senses, it is impossible to take it all in. This matches the content, it is difficult to comprehend the scale of the destruction.
A common theme in Mosse’s work is using different forms of technology to reveal and emphasise what we tend not to see, or choose not to see. In this work, he used a multispectral camera, noting that a similar technology is used to survey land by farmers marked for exploit. As Mosse explains:
So, you could see multispectral photography as being somewhere on the crossroads of the Amazon’s conservation as well as its decimation. It has a role in a both. I’m always drawn to aggravated photographic media, such as this, as it foregrounds for the viewer important elements of the subject itself.
Mosse’s conscious lingering on these ambiguities recalls the first of ‘Kranzberg's laws of technology’: ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’
Another vital part of Mosse’s aesthetic, a constant since his early work on the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been his conscious choice not to forgo that traditional ideal of beauty, but to hold on to it. The manner in which he renders destruction as aesthetically appealing deeply complicates and confuses the viewer. Awe and horror combine to generate deep ambivalence and unease. Through this process, beauty is not abandoned, but repurposed and activated.
Shortly after leaving Mosse’s work at Bozar, the news reached me of the untimely death of Juan Mendez, a talented musician and visual artist. Loss and decay were central themes in his work. An image from his Silent Editions archive:
The news of Mendez’s passing arrived the day after I had viewed Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and with it, my thoughts invariably turned and returned to Auden:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
Tragedy as commonplace, suffering as background. Loss can be such a strange mixture of the everyday and the exceptional.
To finish, recalling these words from Mendez in 2011:
Nothing has changed but everything has shifted.
Indeed. Suffering, beauty, sadness, all blurred and buried together. And still, we must look, we must try to see.