The Residenz reds, properly seductive.
Bavaria’s own red chamber, lacquered in 1731–32 with techniques then radical and only rediscovered in 1994 / remnants of saints once revered and later disparaged when the origins of their bodies were retraced to Rome’s catacombs / an abundance of coral - which Ovid claims descended from Medusa’s remains yet the Renaissance recast as somewhat holy - fundamental both to the architecture of this palace and to the evolution of collecting across centuries / and the State Bedroom with its canopy constructed around the imported ritual of levée-coucher, giving an etiquette to political intimacy.
Beuys’ Badewanne, altered in its care.
Reminded, always, of Anaïs —
Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source - it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishing, but never of natural death.
Something borrowed, something Blaue
Parenthetical grief bracing the centuries from Albert Bloch to van der Weyden.
Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute.
shopping @artbasel avant première
or, an antifascist Picabia portrait from 1943, tabletop Chamberlains, Salman Toor’s intimacy now on paper, the weathering of Sedric Chisolm‘s new Babel, a delightful miniature Giacometti painting then Cy at his most enflamed and monumental, Alicja Kwade’s Entropie series - a staple, an early Adriana Varejão (2003) and finally, an illusory Kim Sooja 김수자 aptly titled Deductive Object
This past Wednesday night with Giuseppe Penone and his new show at the Serpentine 🍂
It is rare, in these years, that whispers are heard at all. Even as Arte Povera has gained public attention in the recent seasons - yes, we all saw the show at Bourse - there has been a solemn distance found between the institutions that now contextualise the movement, and the impulses which birthed it through the 1960s.
Since I was even younger than I am now - when Penone was still at l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, when his 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘥𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘷𝘦 veined through the cour vitrée of the Palais des Études - his work resounded not only by the poesis of its materiality, or its insistent minimalism bridging nature and humanity. What has always remained is the resonance of his artistic language - a visual grammar that echoes yūgen, the Japanese Buddhist notion of the all-encompassing, yet desperately unknowable grace that is the world. Somehow, Penone has resisted categorisation and approached some Kantian sublime.
It is no wonder then, if one believes in coincidence, that the centrepiece of this new exhibition is his 𝘙𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘭’𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘳𝘢, when the most widely read text on Japanese aesthetic philosophy is Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows 陰翳礼讃. At the essay’s close, Tanizaki writes of quiet perseverance towards the sacred, for « I have written all this because I have thought there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved. » I like to think Penone is part of that salvation, unveiling l’ombra che è intrata de nostro corpo, giving form to that elusive and mortal something between anguish and prayer.
And yes, one cannot forget Baudelaire, whose 𝘖𝘣𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 was written under les grands bois over a century before Penone ever carved nature or sculpted bronze:
Mais les ténèbres sont elles-mêmes des toiles Où vivent, jaillissant de mon oeil par milliers, Des êtres disparus aux regards familiers.
