Showing posts with label illusion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label illusion. Show all posts

Monday, 3 August 2026

Venice Biennale 2026: Part two

Venice isn't all about visual art. While we were there there it was the 20th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, directed by Wayne McGregor. The last time we were in Venice we went to see 'We Humans Are Movements' staged in what is usually the home for cinema on the Lido, which was a showcase of McGregor's work with students. This time we went to see three different productions, Of the three, 'Tempo' the collaboration between the Finnish illusionist and visual artist Kalle Nio and Brazilian choreographer Fernando Melo was the most gripping. They were exploring time: its acceleration, its deceleration and those moments when it seems to stand still. Illusion was central to the event, by using black clad actors who were invisible alongside the spotlit actors, feats of gravity defying illusion were maintained. No matter how hard you looked you could not see how it was done, but at the same time this was dance and so the movements were carefully choreographed and all the illusions were integrated into a flowing routine that found poetry in everyday things such as stacking chairs and moving furniture. 


Tempo

So much art is about illusion and I was reminded of this in both contemporary and historical encounters. Anish Kapoor had an exhibition at the Palazzo Manfrin, which mainly consisted of architectural models documenting projects both realised and unrealised. He can work on a monumental scale but the genesis of his works is always the sketchbook, drawing and the model. It was wonderful to see him thinking, even drawing directly on the wall as he had thoughts about where objects ought to be located. Running right through his ideas are concepts of illusion. From a monumental new black-pigment iteration of his 'At the Edge of the World', which was in the original version coated in a solid, deep red pigment and suspended from the ceiling, to a new 'Descent into Limbo', whereby a hole is coated in a special dark pigment that absorbs light, and is made to look like a flat, harmless black circle. Kapoor tests out our spatial perception, and pushes us into the space of what he calls the 'non-object'. 

Descent into Limbo'

At the Edge of the World





Various architectural models of proposed projects

I was also reminded of a recent post I put up about scale. His models relied upon tiny white human figures to give them scale and yet at the same time I felt that the best of his ideas did not need to do that, they had scale in their form. I thought I could see that beginning to evolve in his drawings made on plywood boards. He obviously begins an idea with drawing, often making a drawing directly on a board that he will then use to build up a physical idea. 



Ideas sketched onto board

The idea becoming three dimensional

This simple 'roll' of clay, already feels as if it is going to be monumental. There is something about its form that suggests that this is not a slug or a curl of paper, it has a rightness that comes from a deep geometric grasp of form. Notice how on the plywood sheets, curves are strengthened and redrawn until they create powerful inner and outer forms. The lines of drawing are finding spatial forms, which are then supplemented by three dimensional forms that will gradually replace them. I was reminded of Bezier and other mathematical curves and the difference between vector graphics, forms built from points, lines, curves and shapes using mathematical formulas and raster graphics, built from a fixed grid of pixels. Vector based forms can be enlarged without the loss of their basic structural integrity, whilst a pixel based form cant.
However, in the corner of one of his workshop spaces was an old sculpture of the Virgin Mary, her halo still intact, a reminder of earlier traditions whereby illusion was used as a signal or sign of religious power. Throughout history, optical tricks, staged theatrical wonders and divine signs linked to illusion have been used to project religious authority. From trompe-l'œil ceiling frescoes painted to create the illusion of open heavens, to staged miracles, whereby religious tricksters used hidden lights, mechanical devices, or projected visions to act as proof of supernatural favour. You could see what Plato was getting at when he railed against art and its reliance on mimesis.
Mary in Kapoor's studio

In Mary's case we are led to believe that she could carry God's son, a concept that relies upon belief and belief can be used to stimulate many forms of illusion. That belief was unpicked beautifully by Patti Smith, one of the contributors to the Holy See's pavilion, 'The ear is the eye to the soul'. Inspired by the life and work of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Smith recited poetry invoking the Virgin Mary and the birth of Jesus as her contribution to an ensemble of new commissions by 24 sound artists. I found her recital immensely moving, as I listened to it whilst sitting in the beautiful Giardino Mistico dei Carmelitani Scalzi. Because both my wife and myself had been so moved by this, we also went to the Holy See's other pavilion and once there I found myself engrossed in the writings of Saint Hildegard and the historical images that had been made in response to her life and work. 

As well as being able to read Saint Hildegard's writings, which I found really helpful in the way they related spirituality to the body and healing, there was an artist's book series, 'Viriditas' and 'Caderno I and II' by Ilda David on display and I found her contemplative drawings chimed with the drawings I had myself been making in response to the work I am doing at St Margaret's Church in Headingley. 








Ilda David

Saint Hildegard has over time inspired many artists and the exhibition had several of images on display that were supposed to give us clues as to what she had been up to. Many of these were taken from Medieval manuscripts and they often showed her emanating fire from her head or demons from her mouth, as well as there being a section on the geometry of the body and its celestial meaning. 



From the Holy See exhibition

As I looked at the cosmological diagrams, I was reminded of Chinese and Korean acupuncture and acupressure diagrams. They also have similar associations. Chinese acupuncturists view the human body as a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm of the universe, connected through Yin and Yang, the five elements and cyclical time. Health is achieved by harmonising internal energy (Qi) with these external natural rhythms.

Master Tung 's palm chart

Master Tung (Tung Ching-Chang, 1916–1975) was a legendary Chinese acupuncturist from Shandong province famous for his personally invented acupuncture system. His palm chart is a diagnostic tool used to assess internal organ (Zang-Fu) imbalances by reading colour changes, shadows and blue veins on specific areas of the hand. 

The hand in palmistry 

I was back thinking about the body again, what it might mean, how it can be thought of as a way of connecting with the cosmos and the body as its own landscape, as well as an invented image. This reminded me of the experience of visiting the Italian pavilion in the Arsenale on our first day in Venice. 

Chiara Camoni

As soon as I walked in I was entranced by the work of Chiara Camoni, who lives and works in Tuscany, and is known for working in collaboration, conducting or appropriating ritual and collective making. Her work often incorporates ceramics, natural materials, drawing and sculpture, but what matters most is the process behind it. Families, friends, children, neighbours and artisans regularly engage with the work and this intrigued me. 





Chiara Camoni: Ceramic standing figures

Camoni's standing figures are built in sections, which are stacked one on top of the other. As a device for making larger sculpture this excited me and I was encouraged to think about how my next series of ceramic objects could be built in a similar way. I had already made a couple of much smaller fetish figures myself and had realised that they had the potential to be made much bigger, I just needed access to a larger kiln. 

Fetish figure built in three sections

A place for ritual

Impressive as Camoni's standing figures are, I was even more intrigued by her ritual type objects, such as the one directly above and her figure/landscapes.





Chiara Camoni: Figure/landscapes

As I read about her work, I found that herbs, berries and flowers, as well as various types of clay and ashes are all embedded into her work and that they determine their distinctive tone, recalling the local earths and vegetation that the artist collects and incorporates into her work. You sense connections to ancestral or archaic worlds, and some sort of relationship between craftsmanship and the spiritual. The collective and shared dimension is also relevant to her practice, as the artist often collaborates with friends and relatives or organises workshops and semi­nars to realise her projects. She felt like a fellow traveller, but she was working on a far more impressive scale than myself, both in terms of the size of the work and the amount. Her work was the last I saw in the Arsenale and I was getting a bit tired when I got to it, so it was a welcome relief to encounter it, as I was actually quite disappointed in what I had seen so far. However the following day in the Giardini was a very different experience, one that began with another series of standing figures this time by Seyni Awa Camare who was a Senegalese sculptor, one that I had first seen in the Magicians of the Earth exhibition back in the late 1980s, but who now seemed to be more powerful than ever. I was knocked out by her ability to create narrative and sculptural form at the same time. Each figure had a human presence, impressive in its size as well as its technique. How she was able to fire these I don't know, I've tried fire pit firings myself and know how difficult they can be.






Seyni Awa Camare

Looking at Seyni Awa Camare's work was a timely reminder of how powerful and personal art making can be. She had woven stories about her life, sometimes tragic and sometimes comical, around a quite basic set of formal principles. However I also realised how difficult that was. She had a singular vision but it was not one that only made sense within the cultural tradition within which she worked. Her work was proof to me that art can still transcend cultural boundaries and that there is something common to the human condition that allows us to make work that communicates to any other human who is prepared to remain open to what might be being processed. As I looked around, it felt to me that the Giardini was going to be where I would spend a lot of my time this week in Venice.

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Sunday, 17 January 2021

Drawing textures (Part two)

When thinking about texture and drawing the majority of people will I'm sure think of those drawing exercises many of us encountered when we first began going to art classes. You were often set off to look at how to make 'actual' textures. Usually by making rubbings or frottage, then to create textural surfaces using the various materials at hand, scratching into paint surfaces, dabbing watercolour or ink with natural sponges, making your own applicators from old paint brushes or spiky teasels, laying paper over a still wet paint surface and rubbing your hand over the back of it, then peeling it off to reveal your surprise texture, crumpling your paper etc etc. We were asked both to make freeform surfaces of these textures and to tape out very clearly measured out rectangles, that we had to place our textures into. These were arranged in rows and targets were set such as a minimum of 50 different textures, and then once our tutors had decided enough was enough, they stopped all the frantic textural invention, and then asked us to think about what these surfaces might communicate. Did they look like other things? Did they have any emotional associations? Besides making a few notes in a sketchbook, I don't  remember doing anything else with all those sheets of textural information. We would then very quickly move on and the next exercise would usually be about observed texture or how to create the illusion of a textured surface by making changes in tone. The one I particularly remember was to create the illusion of texture wrapping itself around a curved surface. We made marks that got smaller as the surface moved away from us and then had to think about the way the marks got closer and closer to each other as they created the illusion of a moving surface. Then we had to adjust the marks tonally to create an added illusion of atmospheric perspective, sharp edged darker marks in the foreground and softer lighter marks in the background. Finally as texture followed the shape of the surface beneath, we had to look at how tonality changed in relation to light direction and how we could account for this at the same time as atmospheric perspective.  It's an exercise still worth doing if you want to think about how to build up your ability to draw objects in space, in particular I remember the penny dropping that what I was actually drawing was light and how it operated in the world. Once you realised this, suddenly Impressionism began to make sense. 

Typical sheet of drawing textures 

In these exercises, you were looking at the relationship between invented and simulated textures, and in both cases it was 'illusion' that was the key issue. Did your invented texture look like something else, or did your simulated texture actually look like the surface you had been looking at or touching. (We were encouraged to feel the surfaces we were drawing to get a better understanding or 'feel' for them). However my personal relationship with this textural exploration was always that of the daydreamer, these surfaces became my hallucinogenic tab, and I would find myself visiting landscapes of mountains or forests, as I rediscovered what many artists had before me, that imagined images can easily be provoked into being by gazing at the splots and blotches of surface textures. This ability to see images in surface texture was even given a variety of names by the Surrealists, such as decalcomania, grattage and frottage.*

Typical texture exercise showing how textures change as they respond to light and form

Thinking back at that time, we were never asked to then really explore the implications of texture, the experience of looking was seen as something that was more about seeking out where edges were, or thinking about tone, light and atmospheric perspective. It was as if conceptual thinking was much easier when you had stripped your looking down to basic elements; for instance 'giron and fesspoint' drawing never included any reference to surface texture and the still-life setups tended to consist of various objects painted white, so that you could assess tonal values. 

Textural conjecture was often left alone, or was something you came to last, and in the classical drawing texts at the time, such as Kandinsky's 'Point and line to plane' texture came after all the other elements in a progression through point, line, plane, form, tone and colour. However, I'm not sure this was right. After having to think about the role of texture mapping in CGI, and how it 'authenticates' certain types of experiences and makes you much more aware of touch, I'm wondering how to bring textural thinking back. Point to line to plane, suggests the primacy of not just vision, but a certain atomistic attitude, that is about breaking things down into their primary parts, rather like looking for the atom inside an everyday material. But what if what I really want to do is immerse myself in the heady sensations of textural surfaces? 

I did like this quote from  the virtual drawing instructor, "Think of texture as icing on a cake and think of the cake as form. Icing makes a cake look great but even without the icing it is still a cake. Without the cake, however, the icing is just a pile of goop". 

Hurst sums up what most of my drawing teachers had to say. I can see the problem, my references to Plato and CGI texture mapping in the last post, reinforce the idea of texture being about some sort of deceit or attempt to fool the eye and when I come to think about it texture was at the root of my early art education experience, the greats I was told were the Italians, such as Michelangelo and it was only later that the Northern Europeans such as Van Eyck were discussed, and in many ways as an afterthought, or as the “Flemish Primitives”. I was taught that the Italians like Michelangelo had stripped form down to essentials, and if you compare the simple solidity of Michelangelo's figures with Van Eyck's almost hyper-real surfaces, you can see the argument as was set out at the time; an argument whereby Michelangelo had achieved greatness by stripping away the inessential and giving us a monumental, weighty image that had real gravitas, whilst Van Eyck was demonstrating his undoubted ability to render surfaces with conviction, but it was argued he failed to see the deeper 'classical' ideal of forms that were Platonic in nature and which didn't depend on 'cheap' surface gleam to get over an idea. 

Van Eyck

Michelangelo

In each case texture seemed to be associated with illusion and illusion with deceit. I gradually though as I got older began to seek out Northern European paintings and as I went around various national collections or visited the churches of major European cities would always look for Van Eyck in particular. I was stunned by his ability to render surface detail, the illusion sucked me in and rather than keep my distance or remain cool, I allowed myself the luxury of immercing myself in the enticement in the illusion. It was if I had discovered a guilty pleasure. So what's going on here?

Intellectually I have been educated to think of the painting or drawing of things, in such as way that their physical presence is heightened, as being to do with the rise of Capitalism. As Julia Fiore put it when referring to the textual realism of Dutch still-life painting, "it’s no coincidence that the still life arose as an independent genre of Europe parallel to the birth of early market capitalism and the world’s first consumer society". From Artsy.net Fiore goes on the remind us that if we focus on things that we want to own, we also need to ask questions such as, "Who consumes what, and at whose expense?" Any theoretical focus of course cuts one understanding off from other readings, a Marxist focus on commodity fetishism can underplay the importance of colonial history, a focus on formalism can ignore the fact that all art objects are always part of a process of some sort and that they never can in reality be read in isolation. 

However when I look at Van Eyck, it is as if the surfaces in his paintings are transcendent, the humans that inhabit his paintings seem almost insubstantial in relation to the various surrounding textured objects and their surfaces, a reminder that in a material world no one thing is more important than another, all are in fact interconnected and their existence is part of a commingled set of processes and events. I wasn't around in the early 15th century and understand that all works of art are open to the interpretative needs of their own times. The early 21st century it would seem to me needs a dose of spirituality to help us get over a sense of ennui, so perhaps a rereading of textural surface is due, one that celebrates the equality of everything under the light of the sun, one that makes us value things as well as people, one that makes us realise that everything has value, not just the life of human beings; one that reminds us that everything is interconnected. In order to do this perhaps we need to return to that hallucinogenic aspect of texture. Its dual nature, as both a way of giving realism to objects and of being a doorway into the imagination, suggests an idea of texture behaving as a hinge, something that can dissolve or shape-shift and move between the worlds of matter and energy, between reality and the imagination. There is an everyday experience of looking at a surface from a distance and thinking it is a quality belonging to an object such as a carpet or a table, and then as you get up really close to it, you lose focus on the object and the texture becomes another something, a world totally disassociated from the object, a landscape of dreams. This mutability reminds us that nothing is fixed, and that the universe is a dance of ever changing relationships. 

Surrealist definitions

Frottage is the activity of taking a rubbing from a textured surface, by laying a thin sheet of paper over it and rubbing chalks, wax crayons or graphite over the back of the paper, so that a textural image is created.  Max Ernst introduced the word into the surrealist lexicon, he had been inspired by the exposed grain of a well worn wooden floor that suggested images to him. It's not enough just to make the rubbings, in order for it to be true 'frottage' the surfaces that have been brought out of their located position in the world, also need to be represented as the visions that they have inspired. 

Max Ernst: Frottage

Grattage or the use of scraping techniques to reveal textures, is a way of layering stiff paint over a canvas that can then be laid over a heavily textured object. Then you scrape the paint off, which will collect more in the indentations and be removed from high points. Ernst liked to use organic surfaces like fish skeletons or plant forms to stimulate his imagination. 

Max Ernst: Grattage

Decalcomania was the technique of placing a clean sheet of paper over another one that had just been painted over and then peeling that surface off to reveal the resultant texture. Sometimes thick paint would be used and sometimes watered down pigments, as long as the paint was capable of being transferred from one surface to another the technique would work. Sometimes the paper surfaces would be moved so that the paint was pulled in one direction or another, to further increase the possibility of unexpected imagery. 


Oscar Dominguez: Decalcomania

The Surrealists were re-discovering a very old tradition that goes back as far as you can go back in the history of art. For instance Cozens's 'blot' technique was an 18th century version. His 'A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape' was focused on the blot, which as he stated was a 'production of chance' , which generated 'forms without lines from which ideas are presented to the mind'. You can find images of animals painted in caves 40,000 years ago that were made using the same process. 

Alexander Cozens: A Blot: Landscape Composition

"You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven color. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine." Leonardo da Vinci 

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