Reflecting on Hodgkin:Howard Hodgkin @ the Cristea Roberts Gallery.

"I think words come between the spectator and the picture" - Howard Hodgkin.

That comment can certainly be true - but truer still is that reflective perspex screens come between the spectator and the picture. I understand the need to protect these works (you can buy them and the prices go up to £30,000 - £34,700 if you want a frame. That's not a cheap frame) but when the screens are as reflective as they were when I visited Howard Hodgkin:Strictly Personal (Part I) at the Cristea Roberts Gallery in Mayfair last week it's difficult to make a fair assessment as to whether or not the art would be worth half, or even a tenth, of that, as a lot of the time my own reflection made up half of the image.

I could, of course, have found (most of) these paintings with a quick Google search and included them on the blog but I thought I'd let you see them how I saw them. You can play a little game of spot the blogger if you like. You'll probably find that more fun than reading my thoughts if past experience is anything to by!

Venice, Evening (1995)

Hodgkin died in 2017 (so, we can presume, has had no say in how his work has been displayed) and this free show, held in collaboration with the artist's estate, covers a vast period of Hodgkin's career. Despite it being pretty small. just two rooms of your average sized commercial gallery, there are works from as far back as 1966 and as recently as 2005. Part II will cover the last twelve years of Hodgkin's life.

Even though the show has been split into seven, vague, sections and eras (Early Prints, Palms, Venetian Views, Into the Woods, Acquainted with the Night, Green Thoughts, and After All:The final prints) it hangs together as a whole pretty well. Hodgkin's style didn't change particularly dramatically throughout his career. He always worked at the exact point just before figurative art moved over to outright abstraction.

His images of Venice may not look very much like Venice but, believe it or not, they are. They're inspired by an abandoned project to illustrate Thomas Mann's novel Death in Venice and Hodgkin spent so much time on them, trying to capture the essence of Venice in the morning, that he swore at the time they'd be his last collection of prints.

Venice, Afternoon (1995)

For Jack (2005)

Which perhaps explains their inflated price. It doesn't, however, explain why, as an artist, Howard Hodgkin came to be so venerated. I've seen works of his before that have worked better but this show left me feeling more than a little nonplussed.

We can read about how his art, in the sixties and seventies, "conjured up the atmosphere and the emotions of social engagement within an intimate context", his links with Braque, Picasso, and Matisse, and how his introduction to carborundum printing allowed Hodgkin to "increase the emotional intensity" of his work but in this poorly laid out experience we can't see, or feel, that.

Into the Woods, Winter (2001)

Cigarette (2001)

Sure, the colours are bold and the brushstrokes are bolder still. But the price list you can pick up on the way in, those damned Perspex screens (look at Tears, Idle Tears below, ffs, if I'd wanted to visit a hall of mirrors I'd have visited a hall of mirrors), and the idle notes that explained what Hodgkin did but never really why he did it and why people liked it. All of that combined to provide me with something of an underwhelming art experience and, thus, this lukewarm assessment.

I read that some of these works were inspired by trips to India, others by Paris metro stations, and others from poetry (Robert Frost and Andrew Marvell are both mentioned, the latter a name I'm unfamiliar with) and even discovered that one work was made at the request of Queen Sonja of Norway but none of this told me anything that really helped with decoding, or deciphering, the paintings. 

Tears, Idle Tears (200-02)

Indian Tree (1990-91)

Perhaps words, as Hodgkin said, really do come between spectator and picture but it was words I was crying out for. Without them these not unpleasant images were meaningless daubs rendered in a language I am not fluent, or even conversational, in and that would surely be self-indulgence of the highest order.

Works like Indian Tree, Flowering Palm, and Night Palm, to be fair, made a great save. There was something rather obviously tropical and other worldly about them. They had a beauty where elsewhere there was tumult. Clarity in place of bewilderment. I enjoyed these works more than the rest of the show in its entirety but, for the most part, I think Howard Hodgkin's memory would be served better by a full retrospective in one of London's more august galleries. 

Despite my reservations about this show I'd more than likely attend and I'm willing to bet that a slightly less muddled curation, a few explanatory notes, and less fucking Perspex would have me coming away from said, and imagined, exhibition with a far brighter view of Hodgkin than that which I took away from Strictly Personal I. Howard Hodgkin once said "I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am nothing because I fit in no category". Many more shows like this and he'll be proven correct.

Flowering Palm (1990-91)

Night Palm (1990-91)

Moroccan Door (1990-91)

Interior with Figure (1966)

For Bernard Jacobson (1977-79)

Cy Twombly:Poetry Belongs to the Defeated and the Dead.

"I would like to be Poussin. If I'd had a choice. In another time" - Cy Twombly.

Anybody who has seen Cy Twombly's art will know that he was most definitely not the reincarnation of Nicolas Poussin. His scratchy, abstract, almost mathematical, canvases looked like a messier Jackson Pollock or even the scribblings of a deranged lunatic. Highly amusing comical indie duo I Ludicrous even wrote a song taking the piss out his work. It was the first time I'd ever heard of the dude.

Truth be told, their song made me curious about him and when I finally did encounter his work I quite liked it. It reminded me of Fall LP covers. I might have liked it but I certainly didn't understand it and, as I've got older, I've become a little more cynical of high and confusing concepts and prefer either something beautiful or something meaningful for the most part. At least something interesting.

Batrachomyomachia (1998)

So, I'd gone off his art. A little bit. But his sculptures are quite different it turns out. Gagosian's Grosvenor Hill gallery has collated and curated a show, simply titled Cy Twombly:Sculpture, that gathers together twenty-three pieces made between 1977 and 2009, two years before Twombly's death, and it shows that when it came to this particular medium Twombly showed a bit more restraint than he did with his painting.

They're, for the most part, not particularly meaningful and nor are they remarkably aesthetically pleasing though they remain easy enough on the eye and it's a pleasant enough experience, if nothing mind blowing, to devote some time to wandering round the Gagosian taking them in.

Untitled (2009)

Untitled (To Apollinaire) (2009)

If that's damning with faint praise then so be it. Despite the lofty titles and presentation these are not art works that will change or alter your life. Materials used range from paint to bronze, from wood to cloth, and from nails to staples and the general theme is all quite understated. All the muted whites and greys can start to look like a Dulux colour chart but it does mean that when there's a splash of colour, particularly bright yellow or lurid green, it really stands out.

Most of the sculptures don't resemble anything and don't appear to be even remotely trying to be figurative yet there's one or two that look like either agricultural machinery or kid's scooters. I've no idea what Twombly is trying to say with this work (in that, there is a similarity to his paintings) and suspect that he enjoys the process as much as the results.

Humul (1986)

Untitled (2004)

Untitled (Snafu) (2009)

Twombly was once quoted as saying "white paint is my marble" and with this, as well as his use of found materials, he seems to be trying to unify various different materials and ideas into a coherent whole. The room is set up as you may expect to find more traditional displays in the British Museum or the V&A, as if to say that Twombly might have made new stuff (from old) but that he was steeped in the tradition.

A tradition he clearly tried to gently subvert. But it's so gentle as to hardly feel subversive at all. Nobody could genuinely think these are ancient artefacts and if Twombly is the art prankster many think he is it seems it's less that he's trying to fool people and more that he's getting people to consider why they venerate ancient Roman, Greek, African, and Egyptian relics and statuary so. Is it because they've been put into museums, put on plinths, and had history books written about them? Or is it because they are genuinely interesting and important? I believe it's the latter but then, perhaps, that's just because I've been conditioned to believe so.

Untitled (In Memory Of Babur) (2009)

Turkish Delight (2000)

Untitled (2002)

Untitled (1977)

Herat (1998)

Chariot Of Triumph (1990-98)

Untitled (2005)

Untitled (1998)

Untitled (Humpty Dumpty) (2004)

A Time To Remain, A Time To Go Away (1998-2001)

I didn't think all of this stuff while I was at the Gagosian. I thought about it afterwards, primarily when I started to write about it. Perhaps because the art wasn't quite interesting, or distinctive, enough to give me much else to go on. I pondered why Humpty Dumpty was brushing shoulders with Apollinaire, I wondered how Twombly decided which works he got the colourful paint out, and with A Time To Remain, A Time To Go Away I was returned from my reverie to the mundane and mendacious business of British politics with a harsh bump.

It was made nearly twenty years ago but it seems, in my mind at least, there's no escaping Brexit. I decided it was time to go away (from the gallery, not the EU). I walked up to The October Gallery in Bloomsbury, had a chat with my friend Adam on the phone, and ate a Fry's Peppermint Cream chocolate bar. I was living my best life and if Cy Twombly's random, but pleasing, set of sculptures could be art so could me walking, talking, and eating. Nobody gave me the option of being Poussin either.

Fleapit revisited:For Sama.

"When the masses are against you, when fear is on every side, and when it seems like you are standing alone, that is when you should stand the tallest. That is when you plant yourself like a mountain, and you do what your heart knows is right. Even if death will be your only reward." - The Heart of Aleppo:A Story of the Syrian Civil War, Ammar Habib.

For Sama is a vital, insightful, painfully truthful, and beautifully shot and narrated document of the destruction of Aleppo during the Syrian Civil War. A war that has now raged for eight years and eight months and resulted in the deaths of approximately half a million people. Or 2% of the entire population of Syria.

Understandably, therefore, it is not a remotely easy watch. I'm not particularly squeamish but even I had to turn away from the screen or put my hand in front of my face on several occasions. While shelling and bombing buildings seen from up high can have a kind of abstract quality, almost allowing us to forget there are people in those buildings, seeing children with their limbs blown off or being sewn into body bags and witnessing a baby being delivered prematurely by caesarean section from the womb of its dead mother and then slapped into life brings home just how violent and destructive war is, and it makes no bones whatsoever about who the real victims of war are.

Nor does it take sides when apportioning guilt. Co-director (with Edward Watts) Waad Al-Khateab begins the film as an idealistic, headstrong young lady who is thrown into a civil war following the brutal reprisals to the Arab Spring enforced by murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Determined to document events to show the outside world and, primarily - and this is what makes for such a neat narrative device - her initially unborn daughter Sama, she decides to film not just the atrocities of war dished out by Assad and, later, his Russian allies, but the small moments of joy and despair on the streets, in the shelters, and in the bombed hospitals of her home town of Aleppo.

There is laughter among the misery. A gallows humour so dark you see no light at the end of the tunnel. There is love too. Not least as Waad and her husband Hamza try to make life as normal as possible for Sama despite clearly flinching as nearby buildings are shelled and the streets are filled with gun fire.

Children, however, remain children. They still play. It's just they play in the remains of blown up buses and sometimes they end up buried beneath the rubble of one of the many barrel bombs dropped on them by their own government. Or, indeed, authorised by Vladimir Putin. Sometimes they choke on the chlorine gas that's been sent by Assad who appears intent on wiping out every single person in the city.

Even those that try to escape or surrender are met with bullets. It appears there is no escape. Waab and her friends sing songs to keep their spirits up, Waad and Hamza's low-key wedding is more touching than any grand wedding could ever be due to the background in which it's played out against, but, behind all these attempts at positivity and trying to lead a normal life there lurks the thought that it might be better to have never been born. It might have been better for their children never to have been born.

Waad and friends bemoan those who have managed to escape the city and make better lives for themselves but, more, they despair how the world has stood by and watched their suffering. Or in the case of Putin who has his eyes on a far larger geopolitical game has decided to increase their suffering. They're pawns in a much larger game to Putin and, as such, they are completely expendable. Vladimir Putin appears incapable of humanity and when there is no humanity eventually there will be inhumanity.

It's to the credit of Waad al-Khateab that this film isn't an hour and half long slog from deep despair to even deeper despair. The joy in the faces of the innocent children, quite unaware that living with sandbags in the windows to the soundtrack of a siege is not normal, brighten the dark mood and, more than anything, the work of Waad's husband Hamza and his colleagues in the only remaining hospital (eight of nine were intentionally targeted and destroyed by Assad to weaken the resolve of those who simply sought their freedom) in their part of Aleppo reminds us that all is not lost for humanity. There are people, many of them, who will continue to do good even in the face of pure evil.

For Sama touches on the fear that Islamist militants may come to Aleppo to 'help' in the fight against Assad. Nobody seems to want that. One murderous enemy is enough. Adding another won't help. It doesn't come to pass and, always, Assad and Putin are the bad guys. Gassing, killing, and orphaning children isn't what the good guys tend to do. Since Putin's intervention it's been almost impossible to see how this war can end in any way other than victory for Assad and further death and destruction for the people of Syria. Waad Al-Khateab's terrifying, bleak, and brutally honest film won't change that but it will, one can only hope, prove a valuable document for those in the future who wish to make sure the same mistakes are not repeated again. But do we learn from history's mistakes? For Sama suggests that, tragically and, for many, fatally, we do not. 

¿Que Bola Contigo? Raul Canibano @ The Photographers' Gallery.

I've only visited Cuba once. For a fortnight in 2000 and though I'm fairly sure that, for the most part, I only got to see what Fidel Castro's government wanted me to see (and spent the second week in a 'compound' hotel in Varadero) I still found it a hugely beautiful and fascinating place to visit.

Recently I found myself at the decidedly less tropical Photographers' Gallery in central London where a series of photos from Raul Canibano, titled Chronicles of an Island, sent me right back to that holiday - and made me wish I was there again. Not least because it was raining outside and the prospect of witnessing Amanda Holden, Jamie Theakston, and Danny O'Donoghue from The Script switch on the Regent Street Christmas lights was considerably less tempting than the idea of a bartender fixing me up a mojito while I soaked up some rays to the sound of Beny More or Omara Portuondo!

Playita Cajobabo, Cuba (2005)

Chronicles of an Island is Canibano's first UK solo exhibition and though it's a small one, inconveniently located in the basement next to the shop, that doesn't mean he's a new, or a small, photographer. Born in 1961, he initially worked as a welder until a visit to an exhibition of surrealist photography by Alfredo Sarabia at the Fototeca de Cuba in 1989 inspired him to switch career paths.

Since then, Canibano has developed a reputation as one of Cuba's most respected snappers. It's not always been an easy path for him. Due to Cuban restrictions on imports and the country's absence of dark rooms, he had to transport his negatives to the UK in a cigar box to produce the silver gelatin works on display at The Photographers' Gallery. Despite spending so much time in darkened rooms (and in drizzly Britain), the sun, sea, sand, and socialism of Cuban life seeps into his work.

Malecon Habanero, Cuba (2011)

Even if everything displayed in Chronicles of an Island, from two series - Ciudad and Tierra Guajira, is in monochrome. I've written in praise of colour photography before but I have to admit that Canibano does a lot with his black and white prints.The use of shadows, irregular cropping, and inventive shading all work together to create images that are powerful, evocative, and yet often sweetly sentimental (though never schmaltzy) at the same time.

The little girl proudly, or tentatively, holding a bird aloft in Playita Cajobabo looks both wise beyond her years and completely innocent but the shadowy reflection of a nearby tree gives the image a mysterious appeal that cropped up time and time again as I craned my neck to get a better look at Canibano's poorly hung collection.

Malecon Habanero, Cuba (1994)

Manati, Cuba (1999)

The tiny children's hands wrapped around the neck of their mother's curlered hair, the elderly gentleman in a straw hat relaxing beneath canvas, and the curious youthful face that peers back at the camera. All speak of Canibano's easy way with his subjects, a great passion for his country and his people, and a desire to tell their story free of cliche and didacticism.

Malecon Habanero, Cuba (2006)

Parrandas, Camaguani, Cuba (2007)

His process may have been fraught but the genius of his artistic decisions is down to their simplicity. It's actually quite difficult to free oneself of the emotional detritus and baggage that has accumulated over a lifetime and look at something almost as with the eyes of a child. But Canibano pulls it off with no little panache. 

Some sort of street party, or concert, appears to be going down in Parrandas, Camaguani that looks as exciting and fun as it does anarchic. In Vinales, we see the shadow of an embracing couple reflected on a wooden wall as a dog stands to attention nearby as if stilled by the power of love. There's a feeling of magical realism about some of these images which is merely underpinned by the Latin American locations in which they were taken.

Vinales, Cuba (2007)

Vinales, Cuba (2013)

Vinales, Cuba (2007)

The ordinary and the intangible together as if it's the most natural thing on Earth. Which it is. In Vinales, a lady washes her hair in a bucket while the shadowed figure of a gaucho astride a horse sits vigilant on a clapboard shack, a boy's face is pressed up close to a window in which birds fly around, and an elderly face, lined and sagacious, looks pensively out over a scene in which a man in a cowboy hat prepares to lower his axe on to something unseen.

These photographs deal as much with that, the unseen, as they do with the seen. They exist in a world we instantly recognise while, at the same time, suggesting stories we can never fully understand. Canibano, with a few low key and initially unremarkable images, has created a rich, varied, and intentionally far from definitive personal history of the Cuba he knows. The Photographers' Gallery should give him a much bigger room next time. ¡Chao pescao!

Cienfuegos, Cuba (1998)

Vinales, Cuba (2006)

It's not about perfection:Peter Doig at the Michael Werner Gallery.

"I love Trinidad and I love living there. But it's quite harsh" - Peter Doig.

In 2007, at Sotheby's, Peter Doig's painting White Canoe sold for $11,300,000. At the time, an auction record for a living European artist and, it hardly needs stating, an astronomical sum that, even if Doig only saw a fraction of it, would pretty much guarantee future financial security for the rest of his life.

Given money like that there must be a temptation to retire to the Caribbean and take the rest of your life off. At the very least you'd not need to worry about selling paintings in the future and you'd be free to make whatever you want. 

Musical Equipment Ltd (2019)

While the latter has certainly proved true, the former was not really an option for Peter Doig. Although he was born, in 1959, in Edinburgh, he moved, with his family, to Trinidad just three years later. So he was, for the most part, in the Caribbean already!

In his latest London show, given the no mess title Paintings, you certainly get a feel for the bright colours, the music, the architecture, the landscape, and even the moonlit nights of the Caribbean. Or at least how I imagine it. I've been to Cuba. Once. Nearly twenty years ago.

I'm an unreliable narrator. I'm going by that visit to Cuba and later trips to Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Peru. Latin America rather than the Caribbean in the most part. I also thought back to Doig's friend, Chris Ofili's delightful and intriguing Weaving Magic in The National Gallery's Sunley Room in 2017. The Michael Werner Gallery in Mayfair may be a less august institution than the National but it's got an impressively ornate wooden staircase and you have to press a buzzer before a posh lady lets you in.

Lion in the Road (Sailors) (2019)

It's about the closest I get to feeling important these days. I do feel privileged, however, to live in a city where I can access so much art for free. Some of it is rubbish, some of it is just okay, and some of it is fantastic. I'm putting Peter Doig in the latter category. I can see the influence, in his work, of artists like Edvard Munch, David Hockney, Giorgio di Chirico, and Paul Gauguin and yet his paintings never seem derivative. He appears inspired by these artists to forge his own identity, rather than follow in their footsteps.

He uses them as launching pads rather than role models. They're a fairly disparate bunch of forebears so it's probably no surprise that his art has, for want of a better word, a kind of mongrel quality. It's also this sense of hybrid that I think is what speaks to contemporary art enthusiasts. It's a more democratic style of art, freer, less formal, not constrained by strict guidelines. I can't help but think that Doig's borderline nomadic life (as well as Scotland and Trinidad, he's lived in England and Canada and also held down a post as Professor of the Fine Arts Academy in Dusseldorf) has also deeply informed his art.

Bather (Sings Calypso) (2019)

Music (2 Trees) (2019)

There's a sense of wanderlust, at looking at new things with the innocence, and the eyes, of a child. A sense, really, of wonder. Musical Equipment Ltd marvels at the bustling street life and gaily painted walls of, I'm guessing, Port of Spain, Music (2 Trees) gives a more campesino style view of Trinidad, and Doig's two lion paintings (Lion in the Road and Fire Down Below) capture the metaphysical with their long shadows, juxtapositions, and a sense of magical realism.

Reasonably familiar buildings like lighthouses are rendered unnerving. Shadows take on a menacing nature. The potentially lethal big cats are, in fact, the least concerning element of the entire composition. Other tropes appear and reappear in Doig's work too. Wheelchairs, bathers (cf.Gauguin), and faces that can sometimes look almost haunted or contorted in pain (cf.Munch).

Three Men with a Rope (2019)

Untitled (Small Wheelchair) (2019)

Lion (Fire Down Below) (2019)

Untitled (Wheelchair) (2019)

But, perhaps second only to sunsets, music proves to be a regular feature in Doig's work. Either pushed to the forefront (Music (2 Trees), used as a title (Musical Equipment Ltd, Bather (Sings Calypso), or by the simple virtue of including a musical instrument in the painting. Guitars feature in Music (2 Trees) and a violin in Shadow. I became so determined to see instruments that I even briefly mistook the canvas in Painting on an Island (despite the rather obvious clue in the title) for a piano being tinkled beneath an ivory moon.

Peter Doig owns Boscoe Holder's 1969 portrait of The Mighty Sparrow so, quite clearly, music features in his life almost as strongly as art does. The way he's titled his work (there's only a couple of Untitleds) reminds me of the joy musical artists seem to derive from choosing song names but there's also something about his paintings that, like music, strive to tell a story but not one with a strict narrative.

Or, sometimes, no narrative whatsoever! They're open to interpretation. Doig has given clues and suggested moods but it's up to you to choose your own adventure. Is the young woman lying on the beach in Night Bathers a holiday maker enjoying some well earned rest and relaxation or a local taking a brief nap before returning to work? What's the dynamic between the officially dressed pusher of the wheelchair and the distinguished looking gentlemen in said chair? Why is a skeletal man staring, seemingly intensely even though we can't see his face, across the water to the lighthouse?

Night Bathers (2019)

Hololo Mountain Road (2019)

Painting on an Island (Carrera) (2019)

We don't know. We can't know. It seems quite likely that Peter Doig's not even sure. In giving us such ambiguous images he's created something of beauty for an age where we like our identities bespoke and by suffusing them with such colour he's keeping the Instagram generation happy too. All of which could suggest a trivial artist beloved of corporate galleries and dilettantes but not one that will stand the test of time. It awaits to be seen if there's any truth in that but I'm willing to put it out there and asset that I think Doig's work will remain popular for many years to come. People always want stories and Peter Doig is giving them the chance to make their own. He is, in some ways, Doig it for the kids!

Shadow (2019)

Bather (Night Wave) (2019)