Still Life

Review: Patrick Caulfied, Tate Liverpool.

I’m looking at the interior of a 1970’s style faux-rustic bistro. It is almost completely deserted. A single figure, a bored waiter, leans dejectedly on a piece of furniture, contemplating the abyss of the afternoon. The entire space - with the exception of a kitsch Alpine scene hanging on the wall and some oddly luminous goldfish – is blue. A flat, featureless, slightly depressing shade of blue.

The desperate languor of this, or indeed any, empty restaurant is perfectly observed. So too is every object within it: the bulbous handle of the fondue pan, the generous swirl of the waiter’s sideburns, the curving chrome grid of the modernist chairs. It is somehow humorous too, as perfectly descriptive of a certain mood of dull ennui as those shots of a photocopier endlessly churning out paper that used to punctuate The Office. This is After Lunch, perhaps Patrick Caulfield’s best known painting.

Patrick Caulfield, who died last year, was one of Britain’s most celebrated painters. His work provides a link back to the post-war period when British artists began responding to the emerging consumer landscape around them. His paintings are, broadly speaking, Pop Art, with a certain, mostly superficial, resemblance to Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book style. They are characterised by the use of a kind of pseudo technical mannerism – the thick black outline – to depict interiors and objects with a mixture of both exactitude and lyricism. They have something of the look of an architect’s drawing or a technical diagram mixed with the colour sensibility of Tex Avery.

Caulfield’s work describes the everyday: pubs, Indian restaurants, offices, wallpaper, neon signs, beer glasses, clocks on the wall, cinema foyers: places and objects that are experienced normally in a ‘blur of habit’ and go unnoticed. Images like Morning, Noon, Evening and Night are so spare they could be utterly banal - like an Ikea assembly diagram or the dummest of architectural perspectives. But it’s an Ikea assembly diagram bathed in melancholic light or an architect’s drawing that has been subtly caricatured.

More recent pictures are less literal in their depiction of architectural space. A painting like Interior With A Picture for instance, is no longer based on a single, stable, perspective view. Various techniques - cubist and collage-ist – break up and fragment the traditional domestic interior. A painting on a wall (rendered in a super realist style), a bit of architectural moulding, a splash of light from an opened door, are all set within a dark painted field of shadow. The balustrade of a stair, more bulbous than real life, suggests some ubiquitous Victorian hallway. Crucially, Caulfield is not interested in making value judgements about the places and objects he depicts. They are simply part of the world we inhabit and therefore rich in associative but overlooked meaning. This kind of festishisation of the familiar and the everyday has of late become a popular part of design. Look at something like Habitat’s new Spindle lampstand and you can see Caulfield’s subtle exaggeration of the generic. Now that the playful evocation of kitsch and homely objects is acceptable (in design, if not in architecture), Caulfield’s technique suddenly seems rather prophetic.

Caulfield’s art has sometimes been dismissed as lightweight, chiefly I suspect because of its approachability. The depiction of familiar scenes and the use of an easily understood designer’s shorthand marks him out perhaps as not being ‘difficult’ enough. But this technique is used not just to depict objects in the way that a designer might, but to include emotional as well as technical content. And he subverts the authority of this mode by slipping into different styles, brief moments of painterly expressionism, perfectly coloured and detailed patterns and fragments of other paintings. By showing the world in subtly shifting and eliding codes (figurative, abstract, painterly, cartoon, technical) Caulfield shows us that nothing is ‘authentic’ and everything is in the eye of the beholder, even, and perhaps especially, the idea of unmediated experience. He also shows us that the most familiar objects and places can be made uncanny and remarkable all over again.

More Black, Vicar?

Exhibition Review: Royal Academy Summer Exhibition


For two months of the summer, the Royal Academy is full, rammed to the rafters, with contemporary paintings: some by famous artists, many by Royal Academicians, hundreds of others sent in by amateur artists. The number on display is vast – there are 1333 works here - and in some rooms no wall space is left visible. This is the Summer Exhibition, arts equivalent of Wimbledon or Glyndbourne: very middle-class, very English and very popular.

What’s it like? Exhausting, mainly. After a while, the paintings of houses and hillsides and cats, and more cats, and coy nudes and impasto cityscapes and hazy Venetian canals meld into one vaguely hallucinatory experience that, coupled with the constant background hum of Posh People’s Voices, causes a strangely genteel form of sensory overload. By the half-way point - room 4, lot number 666 (which isn’t a picture of the devil but the Garden Pond, Mistley) - I was starting to suffer from burn-out. An afternoon in the Summer Exhibition feels like taking a tour of a thousand Islington front rooms via Cork Street whilst leafing through Modern Painters and a few copies of Country Life for good measure. It dawned on me, as I progressed, just how many artists there are in this country. I wonder if everyone is secretly off at the weekends, easel in hand, gauche in pocket, to the Lake District, or the Fens, or sketching their husband looking pensive in the front room.

Anyway, there are lots of paintings called things like: Storm Passing, Gulls Flying or Seated Model From Behind, and some excruciating puns such as The Man Who Drew Too Much. Various famous and redoubtable characters are included such as Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Gillian Ayres and the late Eduardo Paolozzi. There is a vaguely homo-erotic painting of a blue sailor painted by a Holly Johnson. Could it really be the Holly Johnson? Surely not. Anyway, it had sold one copy, hopefully not to Holly Johnson. Old RA veteran Anthony Green, who I remember from childhood trips to this exhibition, has his usual 117 pieces in and, I was greatly relieved to see, is still including saucy shots of his missus in them. If people aren’t out on the hillside capturing birds in flight they generally tend to be in the studio being vaguely salacious so, typically, David Mach contributes an enormous sculpture of a naked woman made entirely from Dominoes. And it’s called Dominatrix. No, really.

There is a smattering of more contemporary artists including Gavin Turk, Tracy Emin, and Mark Quinn. There are photos by Sam Taylor Wood and Andreas Gursky. Michael Craig Marin contributes a tricksy computer animation. And, I was just wondering whether Julian Opie would pop up, when lo and behold, he did. There is also a special room devoted to Ed Ruscha, who’s conceptually clarity and focus came as a startling shock in the context.

Finally, and with some sense of relief I found the architecture room. Home turf I thought. Mind you, even the curators seem to have given up by this point, professing ignorance of the contents of the room and of architecture in general. Traditionally, this room gives architecture something of a bad name with practices chucking in a couple of curling competition boards they had hanging around the office. There are also lots of antiseptic white models of urban plazas or perspex office blocks and the odd little sketch of a house in the country. At least you are safe from pictures of cats in here.

Worst thing in the room has to be Michael Manser’s proposals for Heathrow Terminal 5 which looks as horrible as you might imagine Heathrow Terminal 5 could look. There are some nice drawings by the late Ralf Erskine which speak very much of their own period. Other highlights include a huge model of Will Alsop’s ‘Chips’ building, which has plastic fish in it, and some very nice drawings by CJ Lim of a landmark proposal for the 2012 Paris Olympics.

Overall, the Summer Exhibition leaves you reeling with the sheer monstrous amount of it all, unable to make much sense of individual works. Like most classic English days out it seems to exist partly as an excuse to drink tea and eat a lot of cake immediately afterwards. I certainly needed to sit down. Possibly, at my own easel. Now, if I can just catch the quality of that passing Cumulo Nimbus…more black, MORE BLACK!!…..