Accompanying Text Written By Aidan Dunne.
In the autumn of 1890, Claude Monet began a series of paintings in a field of haystacks on a neighbouring farmer’s land. Within months, he had amassed 25 of them and his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel exhibited 15 in his gallery. In the context of their time they were exceptionally pared down, repetitive works. Monet’s commitment to a single, prosaic motif could seem puzzling (Pissarro remarked that it was sad to see him reduced to repeating himself) but, all the same, buyers from home and abroad snapped them up. Later that decade, the young Wassily Kandinsky saw one exhibited in Moscow. “For the first time,” he wrote, “I saw a picture. That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognise it…” The object, the motif, he immediately understood, had been transcended. It was as though the nominal subject matter was but a doorway into the painting.
Following a parallel path, in Provence, Paul Cézanne was making the same
discovery via the landscape in the vicinity of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and through still life arrangements. His achievement only became widely apparent with the posthumous memorial exhibitions at the Salon d’Automne and the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in 1907. Picasso, Braque and Rainer Maria Rilke were among those whose eyes were opened by these shows. Born that same year, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty later became fascinated by Cézanne and wrote about him. Intrigued by the phenomenology of perception, Merleau-Ponty conceived of painting as entailing a different kind of vision.
We do not look at a painting as we do at the wall around it, he argued. To actually see a painting, we must change our mode of observation, so that rather than looking at a painting, we must look with a painting. Tuning in to a painting involves tuning in to the painter’s model of the world. It can be tempting not to do that, to opt for predicable familiarity.
The writer Namwali Serpell recently coined the term ‘the new literalism’ in relation to contemporary cinema and culture in general. She is referring to a trend in which meaning is signposted and hammered home, with no allowance made for nuance, ambiguity or irony. The same can be said for much of contemporary visual art, in which iconography, style and meaning are rigidly defined and fixed.
The artists in TRUE COLOUR diverge in many ways. They do not make up a school or a group in the sense of exemplifying a common vision. But none of them is a new literalist. To engage with their work you must step through the doorway and explore the world you find there.
