Things are not what they seem

It was my turn to invigilate the current group exhibition at the Unit 9 Gallery today. Spending five hours with an exhibition certainly gives you the opportunity to view it in a completely different way from that typical of one’s normal contact with a show. Certainly that was my experience.

In addition to an appreciation of the ability of my colleagues, and a chance to see my own work in a different light, I think that I learned something about art. The notion that art is often about illusion is a commonplace. No doubt when I write this the first thing that will come into your mind is the ability of painters to represent three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface. Textures too are only apparent, and the result of tricks with paint on an entirely flat plane. Then, of course, there is the way in which we convey the impression that light is coming from a particular source, whereas there is no actual light–just different paint. Painters of great ability have even been known to convey to the viewer a sense of heat. You get the general idea. I have in mind a different kind of illusion.

It was interesting to note how many of my colleagues were actually conveying the impression that work executed in one medium was actually made using another. I first noticed this with a lovely set of images made from embroidered fabric that appeared to be done in watercolour. Then there was the picture done in needle-felt that could have passed as an oil-painting without closer inspection. A piece that could have been viewed initially as one of Alberto Burri’s distressed metal surfaces was no more than paint, with (as far as I could judge) the addition of a little sand. A drypoint print with an abstract theme was (until examined more closely) “defaced” by a thread that had become attached to the surface. I was even gratified by the realisation that one of my own drawings in compressed charcoal look, to all into its and purposes, as if it was a mono-print.

We have often been complemented in the past for the “painterly” quality of our work, but surely it is equally an achievement to avoid the immediate impression that what the viewer in seeing is, simply, paint.