Léon Spilliaert at the Royal Academy

Léon Spilliaert's work is on exhibition at the Royal Academy until the 20th of September. This is an artist few of you will be aware of because it is only recently that critical opinion has shifted in his direction and work that was considered very inferior Ensor type imagery, is now celebrated as work that captured a certain type of mental anguish that existed at the time. Perhaps it's due to our own day's preoccupation with the mental pressures of being locked down and being constantly made aware of the invisible dangers of virus attacks, that has made critics re-visit Spilliaert's images and now see them as important.

Again we have a story of a once thought of poor or unimportant artist's work, being elevated into the parthenon of great art. On the one hand we all benefit by now being able to see his work, but on the other hand it makes me very cynical, as it is hard to resist thinking about the capitalist machinery behind all this reappraisal. Who will benefit from the sudden rise in auction prices and will any of the many struggling artists throughout the world gain anything from his travel from obscurity to fame, beyond a feeling of "well perhaps maybe"...?

The work is though interesting and it reminded me of Munch more than Ensor. The moody threat that lies behind certain types of image abstraction was I thought very potent. As we select out or abstract things from the world in order to envisage it, we are left with the things that reflect our own proclivities, in this case Spilliaert was obviously always aware of the threat that lies in dark pools of shadow, a half seen thing or a sinuous shape. All of which are things that we can flesh out through drawing and it is a certain type of reductionist drawing that lies at the root of his image making.

The image above of a bed covered in a white sheet could be a simple study in tone, but of course the white shape can also become a ghost like figure, we read the empty space as absence, and we are presented with a sparse composition that makes us think that someone has just died.

Spilliaert drew a lot when a child and we still have his sketchbooks.

Sketchbooks always help us to see how an artist thinks and in Spilliaert's early work you can see a certain morbid fascination coming through very early on; perhaps he was a sickly child.

For myself, I am mainly interested in the way that he can animate inanimate objects by drawing them in such a way that there is a certain ambiguity about their representation. 

The pair of gloves above could be anything from jellyfish to old people, they morph between one form and another, which I can see from Spilliaert's point of view made them slightly sinister; however I like the humour and playful possibilities suggested in the way these gloves are always on the edge of dissolving and becoming something else. I mentioned Flann O'Brien's 'The Third Policeman' recently as an alternative type of drawing theory and this is another image that I think fits into O'Brien's comedic model.

See also:

Drawing water (includes an extract from the Third Policeman)

The Royal Academy details of the exhibition

Drawing hands