King Kong is one of her shooting paintings, with plastic objects embedded in panels covered in plaster and then shot at with black paint. At the top centre, there is a sun, bleached, frowning, with black blood flowing from its eyes down onto the world – onto the monster, a Tyrannosaurus Rex (I first thought of Godzilla; there was a film of King Kong fighting Godzilla that came out in 1962). The monster is attacking the skyscrapers, and planes fly in from the right to, presumably, destroy the beast. But they could also be bombing the buildings, and communicating Niki de Saint Phalle’s criticism of the destructive nature of those Cold War times and their proxy wars.

The monster is not a flesh and blood monster, it is an aggregate of plastic lizard toys, bent chicken wire, scraps, cloth, plastic shrimps or crayfish, a death mask, and many things difficult to discern – a living detritus of our society that has become a monster to attack humanity. Perhaps an early environmental sculpture criticising consumerism and a plastic society. Niki de Saint Phalle was a visionary and revolutionary thinker.

The wall of faces comprises ten harrowing masks that communicate the Cold War. These were “found objects” that she used, perhaps US President John F. Kennedy, USSR’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev, France’s General de Gaulle, and Cuba’s Prime Minister Fidel Castro, but I could be mistaken. They are spattered by the black blood of the times, the white and black palette presumably representing the duality of life and death, though in this artwork, white does not appear as life, but rather as what’s left after life is bleached out – a hollow mask in plastic, plaster and paint, like bones bleached in the desert sun, only an echo.

Death is represented by the couple to the left of the set of masks, with the bottom left mask being the skull of a bodiless man, next to presumably his wife holding the wedding bouquet, all soot, charred, black to her chest. They are not flowers of joy. Her eyes are empty hollows; perhaps the prince she married died in the wars.

There is, however, also life – a child on a bicycle, children playing ball above a white heart with a black hole in it, all under a woman, with black hollow eyes, giving birth in harrowing detail. She is broken, hollow, made of an amalgam of recuperated toys – a horse, carriage, soldiers – toys no longer able to bring any joy, also defaced by the dark mark of black blood or oil. This life is dead, or at least under the threat of death and destruction of those times, still speaking to us today. Here, part of the black blood seems to flow from the breasts and broken-open chest of the mother: motherhood and innocence destroyed—more than a broken heart.

King Kong is a fundamentally disturbing work, less beautiful than Picasso’s Guernica, but, to me, as powerful, even if less iconic. King Kong is a statement of society. In the film, people killed the gentle (until aggravated) misunderstood monster, raising the question of who the monster is. In these times of resurgent militarism, war, aggression, and unspeakable suffering in Ukraine, Gaza and Israel, Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, DR Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, across part of the Sahel… the list goes on unfortunately… we need more leaders to look at works of art like King Kong and choose a different path. The right road, unfortunately, has not been taken, and history repeats itself. Niki de Saint Phalle also presents society with a choice: the joy of life, embodied in the colourful, expansive, dancing woman, and the spiral of death that leaders have too often chosen.

The exhibition – Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hultén is on at the Grand Palais (Champs-Élysées Galleries) until 4 January. There is not much time left, but it is more than worth the visit. We live in anxious, heavy times. Art can shed a useful light on our predicament and choices.

L’article Learning from Niki de Saint Phalle’s King Kong est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

The first painting of the batik series, with its white forms, yellow dots, and patterns on a brown background, is Emu Dreaming. The border patterns represent the Anwerlarr (pencil yams), and within this frame, lizards, bush turkeys, insects, fan-flowers, and grasses. The Dreaming (Creation time) is fundamentally important for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Peoples and their social, cultural and spiritual practices. As noted on the exhibition info sheets, “Ancestral beings, popularly known as Dreamings, manifest themselves in Country and its many diverse life forms. Plants, animals, and natural phenomena, such as winds, fire and rain, travel across Country, shaping landscapes as they go. Important places and their Dreamings are celebrated in songs and ceremonies.”

Emily Kam Kngwarray painted her “Country”, an important concept in her tradition, combining landscape and the living ecosystems with their water holes, skies, animals, plants, and her people’s lives within these ecosystems, as well as the social and spiritual worlds. Untitled (Country and Emu walking) below shows the symbolic emu tracks and presumably a water hole and travelling paths across the country.

As regards deciphering the language of the paintings, dotted circles or concentric circles often represent people together, whether around a campfire or water hole, and dotted lines the paths taken by people or animals (see Australian Aboriginal Art Symbols & Their Meanings – Japingka Gallery, japingkaaboriginalart.com). Others are rivers, landscape features, sites of cultural and religious importance and host hidden private and often cultural-spiritual meanings, as the paintings work at multiple levels. Observe the painting below – Untitled (Alhalker) – and imagine the landscape, the paths people took from community to community across their country. Or are the lines depictions of ephemeral watercourses appearing and disappearing in this largely arid zone of central Australia? A painting, like a poem, can have layers of meaning, so what is there that we cannot ourselves see?

My Country 1993 also appears abstract, with its fields of orange and red and paler yellow on the centre-right. It is, however, a landscape of her home during a desert storm, with the pale yellow arguably being a sand cloud moving across the landscape. There are fewer clear dots and trails on the right of the painting, maybe showing how the sandstorm obscured (almost) all, at least for a while.

The yellow-dotted Nthang Altyerr (Seeds of Abundance)is worth standing in front of and beholding for a while. Gradually, forms emerge, depths develop, with the yellow dots in the foreground, the pinks behind, and after that, the greens, and at the back, the black. On the left, white dots are up front, and blue- and salmon-coloured dots are farther back. What may initially appear as a two-dimensional statement of abundance gains layer after layer of depth and possible meanings as our minds try to make sense of what Emily Kam Kngwarray has shared.

When first standing in front of Anwerlarr (Pencil Yam), it initially appears equally abstract as Nthang Altyerr, but gradually the pencil yam shapes emerge, looking like five-toed emu tracks. These shapes are clearly visible in the photo below, but from the painting, they only appear after a few seconds of looking.

The Pencil Yams (Anwelarr) are important for Emily Kam Kngwarray. Her name, Kam, is the name of the seedpods and encased seeds of the pencil yams. They change colours over their lifetime: first white, then yellow, and finally reddish-brown, and the transformation is linked to life stages, from children, teenagers, to older women. This is an additional key to decipher the paintings.

Anwelarr (My Story) is a rich, hypnotic painting, with many dozens of interconnected paths and thousands of dots, a landscape of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s life. It feels like looking at a rich part of the Milky Way and gradually discerning the constellations, each imbued with meaning.

Below is another painting titled Anwerlarr 1 (My Story), but this black and white was painted in 1995. It is almost an abstract, or selectively representative painting that could fit in any modern art gallery and be welcomed as part of a modernist tradition, even if it emerged from a very different socio-cultural context. But it is not abstract art, rather a type of connecting map that invites us to ask what all the paths and forms represent, where they lead to and what they connect. It is an invitation to wonder and explore.

I’d like to end with the Song of the Emu. Like the above-mentioned Abundance of Seeds (Nthang Altyerr), the more one looks, the more the painting transforms, acquires depth, and invites us in for a journey into the landscape.

At one level, it appears to be painted from the perspective of a high-flying bird. At another, it seems to be a horizontal landscape with a “vanishing point” a little right of the centre of the painting. A few moments more, and the blue dots made me think of water, and Monet’s water lily landscapes came to mind. I’m sure that had I spent longer there, more and more images would have emerged as the painting continued to transform in the mind’s eye. In writing this article, I recall the title – The Song of the Emu – an interpretation I completely missed and arguably shouldn’t have, given the cultural importance of the emu to Emily Kam Kngwarray and her people. The title and the artist’s intention raise an additional intriguing question: how to depict the song of a bird? The exhibition is a reminder – slow down and see, and while enjoying the wonder, take time to read too, but consider leaving the reading of the labels and information sheets until after a first (proper) look at the paintings.

The Tate Modern exhibition runs until 11 January 2026. See also Paul Daley’s insightful article on the 2023-4 exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, as well as the video and NGA audio learning tour on the NGA site that offers additional insight into Emily Kam Kngwarray, her people, her country and her creations. The NGA also houses the world’s largest collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art.

L’article Emily Kam Kngwarray: A profound and subtle tradition est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

One of the most immediately powerful portraits is Tim Benson’s Cliff, Outreach Worker (2024), awarded second prize. Cliff’s face is so present, filling the canvas and wrought in thick strokes of paint. His eyes stare out to up left and, in parallel with the cross-beam, creating an internal frame. The line contrasts with the mouth that goes down from right to bottom left, parallel to Cliff’s downward-sloping right shoulder. The head is firmly vertical, perhaps a statement of solidity and Cliff’s upright nature. He helps young people start and grow their businesses and is a local pillar of the community.

I also immediately liked Yvadney Davis’ Inset Day. Davisherself is dressed up in a pink and red trouser suit, but sits heavily on the sofa, hands almost limp. She looks weary and weighed down by responsibility, while her daughter, in a red triangle dress, keeps herself amused by walking on the cushions of the sofa. They are together, but in different headspaces. Yvadney is not quite looking at us, lost in thought, perhaps trying to motivate herself to find the same energy as her daughter and start the day.

Shinji Ihara’s Light and Shadow is an intriguingcomposition with the artist at the bottom of the stairwell, standing with a bunch of bags and a little oval mirror reflecting his partner at the top of the stairs – either reading a newspaper while waiting for Shinji Ihara’s return, or taking a photo of the moment, catching his own looming shadow much larger than the perspective-diminished Shinji Ihara, and infinitely larger than his own reflection in the mirror.

Below is an extract zooming in on part of the painting. See the impressive level of detail. The work echoes van Eyck’s iconic The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), also at the National Gallery. Art communicating with art over the centuries

Pippa Hale-Lynch’s The Echo is an intriguing blurring, moving self-portrait with the elongated, multiple irises and what could be a camera flash caught as a juddering white line running from pupil to pupil. Many of her watch us looking at her. But the eyes are out of focus, or rather, don’t quite look at us. She is in her own world, lost in reflection. It is also a reminder that many moments make a person, and portraits try to capture, in a moment, a flow of history, a string of evolving identities. Here we feel the multiple thoughts fighting for primacy in the sitter’s mind, but she is unanchored, watching the stream of ideas or memories or dreams race across the inner screen of her mind.

The sitter in Martyn Harris’ Memories, Gillian, hands clasped in front of her, stares to the bottom left, miles away, lost in her memories. It is a delicate, respectful portrait that won third prize. The skin feels so real, realist without being hyper realist, as does the grey hair. Her eyes are slightly red, as is her nose. This, her slightly pulled back bottom lip, and the clasped hands suggest Gillian was reflecting on a past loss, reminding us of the challenges of surviving into old age. So much lived, yet so much long gone.

The first prize was awarded to Moira Cameron’s A Life Lived with its refreshingly bold figure, the giant blue armchair and green dress, the silhouette legs folded from the bottom centre to the bottom right corner. The body forms an arc, counterbalanced by the arms that echo the curve of the back of the chair, with the armrests and right leg of the sofa anchoring the portrait. The drops and dashes of paint give a sense of time, the little rounds on the sofa and dress not only give energy to the painting, but also hint at moments of her life. Moira’s expression here is contemplative, and she looks, like Gillian above, out of the page to the bottom left. I like the tension between the refreshingly free painting style and the sense of brooding.

There are so many more paintings worth writing about, from the hyper-realists (a dozen exhibiting) who always impress technically (how to they do that!?). to more symbolic painters (here Xu Yang) and interesting takes, like Nelson Hernandez’s back of the Ukrainian Girl, one of the few paintings with a geopolitical edge, another being Call me Albie, by Ashley Ogilvy. For these and the other forty portraits not covered here, go to the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2025, open until 12 October 2025. See also Jenny Saville’s astonishing The Anatomy of Painting. The Portrait Award, as per tradition, is free-entry, while the Jenny Saville exhibition, on until 7 September, has an entry fee, but it is definitely worth it. Both are. As indeed are so many other portraits at the National Portrait Gallery.

L’article Capturing people in paint est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

The iconic Propped is an early work that announced Jenny Saville’s arrival as a major figurative painter, inspired by Lucian Freud, but going beyond, presenting the truth of flesh and posing questions about society and its gaze. The overall diamond shape defines the composition, with the crossed hands and fingers digging into the fleshy thighs at the centre of the painting – the anchor-point of tension. The head is leaning partly back, angled away, but still looking down at us, whether in disdain or discomfort is unclear. The top of the head is not shown, suggesting that the sitter didn’t wish to be the subject of a viewer’s gaze.

The uncomfortable positioning of the head and the fragility of the hands are countered by the strong knees and legs, and the overall willingness to say: here I am, this is me. The painting asks us to think about the perception of the female body. The hands digging into the flesh could be seen as nervousness about the stares of others, their expectations; it could also be seething anger. The painting asks us to look again at the tradition of painting the nude, the distorting male gaze and culturally induced self-perception.

Hyphen is a double portrait of the artist and her sister, with the contrasting angles of the heads, one forward, with enquiring eyes open to the world, the other leaning back with half-hooded eyes looking straight at the viewer, almost suspicious, a bit weary, perhaps asking, ‘Why are you looking at me?’ The skin is textured, a patchwork of colours, a statement that skin is real, not an airbrushed or AI smooth creation. We are what we are. Raw. Real. And only one set of shoulders are visible, making us think of a two-headed person. Sisters, siblings, separate but together in a wider joint identity, the hyphen of the title communicating the link.

Jenny Saville doesn’t shy away from the difficult and disturbing. She paints people hurt and damaged, the bruises and abrasions represented in thick paint, going beyond realism to a more neo-expressionist form to communicate meaning and emotions. By not worrying as much about portrait realism, Saville makes us question the whole notion of portraiture, what the face is, and how best to convey the person, the emotion and the situation or story. There are others in the Stare Series that are even more disturbing to look at. Bleach, to me, is a type of calm, resigned statement: this is reality, behind the public veil.

Jenny Saville is also a draughtswoman, drawing portraits in pencil and charcoal. In Neck Study II we see her talent with line, skill with graphite. In addition, it is not a static portrait. Here, there is an intriguing movement of having two portraits in one, again making us think as to what a portrait is, should be, could be. Also, it underlines that we are more than a snapshot. It is beautiful, eerie and stays with us even after we walk to the next artwork.

Rosetta Study shows the same talent, here a preparatory drawing, part of Jenny Saville’s project to depict Rossetta, a blind woman from Naples. Here we see the unseeing eyes. The face, hair, neck and part of the hands are drawn in real life form, down to the single hairs, but the body and the rest of the hand and arm are more of a sketch, and the contrast between the “finished” and the “started” adds an energy to the whole.

Rosetta is a harrowing, yet beautiful piece, with white and sky-blue unseeing eyes pulling us towards her. There is the weary angle of the head and neck, the almost eroded skin, perhaps oil-spattered shoulder, all make us feel that she, we, are decomposing in the world we made. Rosetta, and by implication, we, are blind. In these times of war, famine and human rights abuses, where politics has become a post-truth reality, we are all in some ways Rosetta, partly blinded, certainly worn out by what is happening and needn’t be happening (see also Brian Maguire’s declaration of the illusion of human rights).

I don’t know whether this was the intention behind Jenny Saville’s painting, which pre-dates the current global problems, but that’s the feeling it inspired, compounded by local realities of many living lives that are not blessed with Hollywood endings. But to move it back to less harrowing ground, Saville’s portraits ask us to look again at who we are, the role of the distorting male gaze on female bodies, and how we wish to capture reality in paint.

The woman’s name, Rossetta, also immediately brings into mind the Rosetta Stone, and in this context, Jenny Saville’s painting provides us with interpretive tools to help us see the reality out there that is often glossed over or ignored. Furthermore, Rossetta, in the painting feels like she is sensing, seeing the world without the power of sight. Perhaps that is the Rossetta Stone, with Jenny Saville showing us that we can sense in so many ways. These words don’t do justice to the experience; go and stand before Rossetta.

Jenny Saville’s The Anatomy of Painting is on at the National Portrait Gallery in London until 7 September 2025. Thanks also to the Gagosian network of galleries and to the many owners of the paintings who made them available for this not-to-be-missed exhibition.

Jenny Saville said, ‘I want to be a painter of modern life, of modern bodies.’ She does, but, trigger warning, there are also paintings of damaged faces, notably in her Stare Series of colossal portraits. Go and you will get an XL serving of the harsher side of reality. Tenderness too.

L’article Flesh and faces: Jenny Saville’s unfiltered exhibition in London est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

At first look, I’m drawn in by the oranges and reds that also give a sense of warmth, of a special point in time, and the emotions of the end of the day. Then the still there light blues of the sky pull my eyes, giving a sense of cool, or potential, of travel, of tomorrow. After the anchoring shape of the sun’s trajectory as it sets, the painting is not a static picture of a moment, but captures a movement, a skyscape equivalent of early modernists’ exploration of motion and representation of the flow of time in the static of a painting. Finally, I’m drawn to the many patches of colour in the mudflats of the tidal delta that reflect the generous skies.

The skies of the Baie de Somme in France are forever changing. While there are a hundred greys in the delta (as wonderfully captured by Pippa Darbyshire), and delicate shape-shifting clouds (as captured by Annette Hiltermann), Andrew Simpkin lets his love of geometry mix with the ever-changing colours of the skies. He offers us the bejewelled heavens with a hundred facets and reminds us to look up. And keep looking up, seeking the different hues of the sky. Marvel at how the rules of physics create such a moving kaleidoscope. Or ignore the rules behind nature and simply enjoy the sunset.

Simpkin’s works are a type of neo-cubism, and in some cases would be perfect, too, as stained-glass windows. The sunsets are particularly spectacular. As the sun edges behind the horizon, the vast planes of the sky change in colour by the minute, faster even. The sun reflects in the tidal mudflats adorned by snaking streams as well as hundreds of wet mirrors of forever changing size, each capturing the sun in different ways and hues – blues and purples and greens, aside yellows, oranges, even salmon and pure white.

There also seems to be an influence of Sonia Delauney, the famous Parisian artist, born in Ukraine when it was part of the Russian Empire. She, together with her husband Robert Delauney, worked on pure colours and also on ‘simultaneous’ colours, exploring contrasts. Simpkin has similar research within the landscapes. Viewers can look at patches of paint that vibrate on their own and then see the power of the contrasts with neighbouring brushstrokes.

Staring at Simpkin’s work also brings to mind the works of Hilma af Klint, the mystical pioneer of abstract art, who explores colour and shapes and seeks meaning in them, through them. The Swedish artist (born 1862) dedicated her life to giving form in her paintings to the invisible reality of the spirit world. Whether one believes in that or not, the beauty of the sky during sunset can elicit a sense of awe and wonder.

Even cloudscapes can be intriguing, through their form and on how they are canvases upon which the sunset paints by leaving a momentary echo of itself, infusing the white into a range of colours to contrast with the various sky blues and more solid mountain hues.

Staring at Simpkin’s paintings reminds me of another artist too – Wim Wenders and the film he directed, based on a script written together with Takuma Takasaki – Perfect Days. Hirayama (played by the extraordinary Kōji Yakusho), the Tokyo toilet cleaner and hero of the film, gets up at dawn and always stops for a moment when leaving the front door to look up at, and take in, the sky. A moment’s connection between a modest man and magnificent nature. It is an important punctuation point in his day. And whatever our jobs, it can be an important anchor point for us. Simpkin’s beautiful landscapes (that will feature this summer in “le Salon d’Automne” in Paris) remind me of the importance of looking up. 

Taking the time to behold the sky costs nothing but can be much more than a momentary parenthesis in a busy day – it can be an invaluable pleasure and reminder of a life worth living, even in these globally complex times. 

L’article The skies are for everyone est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

Brian Maguire’s La Grande Illusion, hosted by the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, pulls no punches. I’ll start with a painting that is easy on the eye, but after that, all changes. Read on only if you want to see the truth of our times. Trigger warning: at least one of the paintings is hard to look at.

Maguire’s painting below almost feels like a beachscape. There is a beautiful blue. A man stands contemplating the water. We don’t know why or what he is searching for. Maybe he is just enjoying a refreshing break, admiring the expanse of blue. But this painting is Brian Maguire inviting us into his big illusion. Enjoy it. Then read the title – Over Our Heads the Hollow Oceans Closed Up. Ominous words heralding what is to come in the exhibition. 

The hollow oceans and seas have too often been filled with the shipwrecked, with lost migrants. Some make it. Far too many don’t. We all remember the two-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, washed up on shore on 21 December 2015, a tragic victim of a failed attempt to escape the civil war and reach Europe (the Italian artist Jago sculpted Figlio Velato to help us never forget the tragedy). Brian Maguire, in his series Remains, presents us with another vision and memory of loss – of those lost migrating from Mexico to the US, washed up, broken, not on Mediterranean beaches but on the parched desert sands of Arizona. He cannot cover every tragedy individually, so he “looks for a single image that tells the whole story” (see his video, on Remains). 

The Syrian civil war has been a civilisational tragedy. Aleppo should be a city known and heralded for its history – it has been a centre of civilisation for around eight thousand years. But it is now not known for housing the Amorite people, nor as an ancient trading city between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, as the centre of worship of the Storm-God by the Hittites, nor as an important part of the Ottoman Empire, its third biggest city. It is known for its destruction and the misery of the Syrian Civil War. Brian Maguire captures the loss of life in the grey, burst-open, broken buildings. The paint turns to rivulets of colourless blood in the lower part of the painting. War. Power. Destruction. We’ve all seen far too many similar press photos from Gaza and Ukraine. 

Brian Maguire also explores the impacts of gang warfare and the tragedy of murdered women (the “feminicidio”). We are all used to the classical art of Perseus holding Medusa’s head (notably Cellini’s famous statue in Florence), or Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, and treat them as literature or art to be marvelled at. Modern-day beheadings are no acts of literary creation or for artistic pleasure, but barbaric, heinous crimes that profoundly revolt. Skip the next painting if you wish. I didn’t select Maguire’s painting of the head on its own, as it was even more disturbing. 

The destruction of the environment also features in Maguire’s outrage in paint. Below, in Burning Amazon (2023) and Clearcut Amazon (2023), he depicts the destruction of the Amazon, arguably the crown jewel of global biodiversity. In Burning Amazon, we see soot, charred trunks and blood-red fire. No trees are left. No green. None of the amazing species. Just our burning civilisational footprint. In Clearcut Amazon, where are the deep green canopies humming with life? All I see is a huge gash scarred right across the landscape to the horizon. An open wound. Much of the destruction is by illegal loggers, criminals not only against nature but also brutal in their suppression of truth. There have been beheadings of environmental defenders trying to document unlawful practices, as horrifically exemplified in Juan Bautista Silva and his son, Juan Antonio Hernández’s macabre death in Honduras. Beheaded and dismembered by chainsaw. They are not the only environmental defenders murdered, silencing the truth. Globally, more than 2,100 land and environmental defenders were killed between 2012 and 2023.

One act I had, until recently, thought firmly relegated to an unforgivable chapter of European history – the nazi salute – returns as a warning of modern fascist tendencies in Maguire’s Police Graduation (Juárez). Unfortunately, the image, with the black boots and the bodies leached of humanity’s colour, resonates beyond the tragic European past. Where has civilizational memory gone? Will the meaning leech out of the emphatic phrase-  Never Again!?

With all this pain, fear and hate, it is best to end with hope. Below is a picture of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A commitment by all leaders to respect and enforce these would lead to lesser inspiration for painters like Ireland’s Brian Macquire, Italy’s Jago, South Africa’s William Kentridge, or the many other courageous artists painting the world as it is, so that we may not ignore the warnings.

Brian Maguire’s exhibition in Dublin, La Grande Illusion, an important but harrowing declaration on the illusion of human rights, has been extended to the 18^th of May. See also his work virtually at the Kerlin Gallery site, and Iverna, which spotlights Irish art and has a great virtual exhibition on the impressively courageous Brian Maguire, who actively visits and engages with those communities affected (South Sudan; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples in the USA, Arizona (for those lost in the border crossings), Mexico, Brazil, Syria). His art is definitely not art for art’s sake. But a rallying call to build a better future.

L’article Brian Maguire’s declaration of the illusion of human rights est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

This was a deeply poetic, spiritual and melodic hour of being transported by the dialogue of the instruments, while making a statement of commonality and unity, knowing no borders. This concert went far beyond making an obvious statement on the importance of intercultural dialogue. The concert was a living co-creation, a majestic, evolving new thing in itself, fundamentally more than a combination of instruments. Each instrument sounded not just as itself, but its meaning fed on the contrast and resonance with the other instruments. A new instrument was alive on stage with seven voices.

It is, of course, best to experience the musical magic live on stage when Mostafa Taleb’s About That Magic Circle gets together, but I hope these words manage to whet your appetite for immersing yourself in the real thing.

Some of the first notes felt very modern, with a minimalistic, atmospheric feel, but this evolved rapidly into something far richer, more than intriguing music-for-musicians-and-the-afficionado, but a rich narrative, an exchange, a creation, a musical poem and a journey.

Mostafa’s composition was inspired by the Persian poet, mystic, and philosopher Attar of Nishapur (c. 1145–1221), author of The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr) and The Book of Suffering (Musibat-Nama), with its themes of water, air, earth, and fire. 

In Attar’s Book of Suffering, a person seeking wisdom turns to the elements for answers. Each in turn says that they cannot help. Air says, ‘I am too weak, as soon as I stop moving, I cease to be’. Water says, ‘ How can I help, I who cannot do anything without the wind and the support of the sky?’ The Fire of Anger cries and through the tears turns to water. ‘See when I stop, all is destroyed; only dust is left. How can I help you?’ Earth concludes, ‘While all comes from me and returns to me… I am nothing without water, wind, fire. So how can I help you?’ 

Each element on its own cannot help, but working together, they can be creative forces. The fifth element, the soul, allows the emergence of life, the ultimate mystery. So, Mostafa Taleb asks, how can I use the positive element? “Establishing the unity of the five elements can perhaps make the world a little bit more beautiful.” This he achieves by bringing together six musicians, seven instruments, their song of the four elements and the voyage of the soul seeking wisdom.

The Magic Circle represents the sacred space where transformation occurs. The CD booklet says that in mystical traditions, a magic circle is a boundary between the ordinary and the spiritual, a place of deep introspection and self-purification. Through this music, listeners step into their own “magic circle,” embarking on a journey mirroring the seeker’s path in The Book of Suffering, even though the concert is quite the opposite of suffering.

The concert kicked off with Sussurus Winds where each instrument plays short melodies in parallel (though with slightly deferred starting points), like little gusts of wind that dance – first separate, here and there, as if to say, yes there are many winds and they each whisper to those near, but everywhere is local, separate. The volume rises, and the winds grow and dance, first apart, but note after note they approach each other, test each other out, then converge and dance together, their voice stronger together, profound, powerful. 

After the air comes water, fire, and earth. Water (Near, Yet Far) started with the slow drip drip drip of rain of the tar, then flowing water, that, extracted from the info pamphlet, represents a cleansing and purifying energy. Fire adopts faster tempos, more aggressive rhythms, and intense harmonic clashes, communicating passion, transformation, conflict, and even destruction, the burning away of impurities to find wisdom, for spiritual awakening. 

Earth (Astral Passage) adopts more stable, grounded, and deliberate musical structures, symbolizing a return to balance. The Earth absorbs and cools the heat of fire, providing stability and support.  Mostafa Taleb’s fifth element – the Soul (Fallen Verse) moves away from the dance of six instruments and is a solo performance, the individual’s journey toward enlightenment, portrayed with softer, more reflective melodies, inviting introspection and connection. 

In the final section (The Endower), a 7/8 rhythm is used, symbolising the uneven, lopsided journey of the human soul toward perfection (we all zig-zag in life). The irregularity of the rhythm reflects the struggles, the hesitation, and the slow progress of the seeker on their path to personal growth, higher knowledge and enlightenment.

It was a magnificent exploration of each element, a movement, a dance, a development, growth, communication, and the elements are brought together to an ever more sophisticated dance, but not into a classical crescendo, but more an organic, growing evolution into a breathing soundscape. It becomes almost a living creature of notes. Even though the acts are sequential, in the end, it is as if the whole concert of notes and feelings still floats as a whole, time-forgotten, independent of space and time. It lives on in us.

It was a truly mesmerising and beautiful hour telling us what we all can help make happen and enjoy if we let it, if we nourish it. It takes the breath of the soul. It is our opportunity, indeed perhaps even responsibility, to be a conductor of the elements in our small worlds and join others already conducting their elements into an ever-growing dance. We are far more than the sum of the parts, doubly so if voices work in resonance, we engage in harmony.

In these times, where the world order seems to be heading toward chaos and confusion, where hate is infecting language, it is all the more important to listen to music that is a fusion of instruments, a dialogue between us, a joint creation, not an inevitable destruction. We have a choice – there is a narrative of hope. Go, listen to Mostafa Taleb’s About That Magic Circle – on Spotify and all other music platforms, but much better on stage. There you can see the musicians inspire each other, and wow, when you see the infectious pleasure that one instrument gives another, one culture gives another, it brings a calming hope. I particularly loved the mutual appreciation of the tar for the double bass and vice versa. Rain can be impressed by the earth, by thunder. And the earth welcomes the rain that dances down.

Which instrument dance touches you most will be personal. Let yourself be invited in and mesmerized by the kamancheh, drawn in to hear and feel the dance of elements and the creation of something new, driven by the breath of Mostafa Taleb’s soul, and wrapping together the cello, violin, double bass, percussion, and tar. Something new and special was created. It lives on even after the instruments stopped. 

Keep an eye and ear out for Mostafa Taleb and his About That Magic Circle. 

L’article Magical notes about that Magic Circle  est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

These all deserve reams of articles, but I want to focus here on the catacombs in Naples, the Catacombe di Napoli, comprising the Catacombe San Gennaro, which started to be built in the 2^nd century and was named after Naples’ patron saint in the 5^th, and the Catacombe San Gaudioso, which began in the 4^th century and lies under the Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità.

The San Gennaro catacombs are eerie and beautiful, with their three generous arches and common spaces adorned with frescoes and mosaics from the 2^nd century to the Byzantine paintings of the 9^th and 10^th. Multi-stack resting places have been hewn into the walls for the dead. The poor were buried in the ground or in specially cut niches in the walls. The rich had individual corners with decorated arching vaults above their resting places. They were called arcosolia – arco for the decorated arch, and solia for the thrones, which includes the sarcophagi inside and generally a flat rock on top, enabling a private mass.

In the common hall, there is a fresco depicting the biblical scene of Adam and Eve and a giant, looming snake, presumably to remind the dead of their original sin. One private arcosolium’s frescos include a peacock and doves to keep the dead company. Another, dedicated to the 6^th-century family of Theotecnus, boasts frescos showing quality clothing and ornaments, underlining the family’s social status. It was painted in three layers, perhaps repainted with each death in the family.

In others, monks and priests stand vigil, forever blessing the patron’s onward journey, possibly trying to increase the likelihood of their arrival in Heaven rather than the “other place.”

In the Catacombe di San Gaudioso, they went further. The rich, if they or their families made very considerable contributions, could get their skulls encrusted in the walls, facing out to see or be seen, and still play a part in society, even if dead. One had a skeleton made of compositions of collected bones. Many others had skeletons painted as frescos. The heads were real, chosen as it was believed that they housed the soul.

Those who made the largest contributions had frescoes of clothes to indicate their station – painted by Balducci. Disturbingly, the front parts of the skulls crumbled away, and we now can see only the hollow cavern of their skulls. Their attempts at being honoured for their social status were eroded by time. See also the article: Is this the world’s most macabre art gallery?

Now for the more disturbing part: the draining ritual for the nobles and clergy. The newly dead was lowered through a trap door in the ceiling (from the crypt of the basilica above) to the schiattamuorto, the undertaker given the task of draining the corpse. The schiattamuorto cut holes in the corpse to enable the cadaveric fluids to drain out and set the body in a niche called seditoi (i.e. sitting), with an opening at the base for remaining fluids to flow away. Once the body was emptied, the schiattamuorto cleaned it and left it to desiccate, beheading it if its owner’s head was to adorn the walls.  Finally, the bones were washed and laid to rest. The work was done by prisoners or monks their superiors judged as needing to be taught a lesson.

Fortunately, the practice has long passed, and the catacombs do not assault our senses, at least not our sense of smell. But our minds reel at the lengths to which the elite would go to insist on maintaining their social hierarchy even in death.

Access to the catacombs is relatively recent and thanks to the efforts of the La Paranza Cooperativa. This social cooperative was inspired by Don Antonio Loffredo, the parish priest at the Basilica of Santa Maria della Sanità, who initiated the movement of engaging youth to help rejuvenate the Sanità region of Naples, retore past and create new local cultural heritage. While I’ve focused here on the Catacombe di Napoli, they also attracted and worked with the sculptor Jago to create an exhibition in the Chiesa di Sant’Aspreno ai Crociferi (see Marble Sentinels) and painters to capture the community in giant blue mural paintings in the Chiesa di Santa Maria Maddalena ai Cristallini, this time not celebrating the rich and dead, but the local and alive and the people who make up the community.

Go to Naples, visit the Catacombe di Napoli and explore the range of uniquely restored churches in the Rione Sanità thanks to the efforts of La Paranza Cooperativa and supporting artists.

L’article The social hierarchy of the dead in the Catacombe di Napoli est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

Go and see her exhibition – The Soul Trembles – at the Grand Palais in Paris. Behold the works, wait, and allow the meaning  to come before searching the info panels and catalogue for clues of what Chiharu Shiota had in mind. Honestly, leave the reading of meaning until you’ve let the images find a place in your mind to anchor, grow and whisper its message to you.

The red threads rising from the metal skeletons of boats bring flames to mind, but flames are not thin, interconnected threads. Are they a spider’s web and an elaborate trap? No, there is no radially symmetric form and no eight-eyed-arachnid lurking. They could be capillaries of blood as the choice of colour is never innocent in art. They could also be the beginnings of a cocoon or the remains of a cocoon, the red suggesting life. But the boats are empty. Did some life float out, metamorphosise, and become a chrysalis for whatever butterfly to hatch and part? The panels say nothing of metamorphosis. Is it a mycelium network? But in the air? Rising up? Possible, but creepy and Chiharu Shiota is not producing horror movies, despite some of her troubling pieces.

My first take was that the boats were funeral boats, such as practiced by the Vikings in Europe (and in the Philippines and Vietnam), with the red lines the thoughts and memories of the dead, their souls rising and reconnecting. On reflection, I prefer the boats as an image of the living us, each alive, a little at sea, a little alone, but deeply connected to others, representing the complexity of human relations – which attunes with the artist’s words. We are connected and the connections are complex.

The blood-red threads knitting together and enveloping us feels visceral as if we were in body tissues. The burnt piano and black strings feel fundamentally different, more as a disaster, a wake, a loss recognised and honoured. The dead instrument is a reminder of the burnt piano carcass left outside Chiharu Shiota’s neighbour’s house after a fire there when the artist was but nine years old. It also echoes an image from the Ukrainian abandoned city of Pripyat, next to Chernobyl following the nuclear reactor disaster. Chiharu Shiota’s piano, with its charred keys, will never play again, the chairs are empty. There is an immense, powerful, utter silence.

Our first skin is the human skin. Clothes are our second skin, said Chiharu Shiota. Memories age our clothes, etch into our skin and bodies. Her seven-metre-long dresses are forever cleaned under showerheads but remain sullied by mud. We dream of washing away the dirt, but life happens, mistakes are made by us, to us, and traces of the past remain. One can never erase the memories of the skin.

Chiharu Shiota also sees a third skin:  …made of the places we live, our walks, our doors, our windows that surround the human being. This she explores in Reflection of Space and Time (2018) and Inside Outside (2008/24) below. The first is to me a dark piece of a wedding dress captured and held by the dark strings. The work feels like a missed wedding and the black strings thoughts of an opportunity lost that accumulated over the years, anchoring the missed moment in a type of time stasis. The dress, however, looks clean white, the form full. It remains, years after, a statement of a powerful moment of hope. Just because it was in the past doesn’t erase it.

A thousand windows, and million glances through.Windows are made to be looked through, and not by one person, but an opportunity for all. A window replaced after forty, fifty years has had how many people look through them? How many things have been seen, events witnessed? A window is private at one level, for a person, a family looking out. Or inside. But a thousand windows? A community, a people, a collective. Each window is like a cell in an insect’s compound eye, capturing a fragment of a whole. What does it see and feel – a thousand windows with glances decade after decade? A million moments. Easily.

Here Shiato presents us Berlin. A city with a complicated history, a complex history, of the worst of humanity and the shame of it all, the banality of evil, but also amazing moments, private moments, public moments. The wall fell, there was hope in a place that had created despair. The assembly of windows asks us to remember, to travel in time, to imagine what was seen through all those windows, In these times of war and fear, our leaders could usefully look at this exhibition and ask what a thousand eyes are going to see and remember of what they do. What are the leaders responsible for? The world will watch and not forget.

Migrating suitcases journey, held up by the red threads of life. They are old leather suitcases, making me think of the exodus from East Berlin to West, and the earlier the exodus from Berlin and those fleeing conflicts today, underlining how we have learnt so little from history. The red is the colour of life, and of life that flowed away. Wait, the suitcases sway lightly on their celestial anchors, and they rise into the sky. Is this a statement of a dream of a better life, full of hope, even after a difficult or even impossible choice to leave?

The title suggests things we accumulate and we leave only with the the essential and particularly precious parts of our lives, each item with a personal meaning for us. This work means many things.

I’ve only covered six of Chiharu Shiota’s works, while there were a hundred – of her with pulsing tubes of white and red, capillaries on the outside, of a thousand toys connected, of her painted in blood red, photographed, herself become the art work, of the films showing her theatre piece productions, sets for operas. Go. The exhibition is open until 19 March 2025 at the Grand Palais. See also the beautiful catalogue with great pictures, of course, stitched with red thread. As I was leaving, what lingered, lingers still, is a web, a chrysalis. I like that. But where are the creatures inside? I thought they were gone, but were they perhaps not gone, but here, walking through and step by step metamorphosising, growing, feeding in the art cocoon of Chiharu Shiota’s mind, and emerging, a little metamorphosised. Do we have new wings to explore the world thanks to this Chiharu Shiota’s exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris?

L’article Chiharu Shiota exhibition in Paris truly makes the soul tremble est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.

La Marafona shows Paula Rego in the blue headscarf, sad, with a far-away, contemplative look as she leans on her father’s arm. He has a kindly but no longer fully human face and “wears” a crown of thorns, symbolising the depression from which he suffered. Behind him, his wife comforts him, her face distorted by deep concern and grief. Her parents remind us of Paula Rego’s giant dolls. The real and surreal come together and communicate empathy and pathos and the grotesque monster that is depression. This is one of many paintings where Paula Rego explores and generously shares her personal relationships and feelings. Even the cat, hiding in the shadows on the bottom left, looks downcast. 

Paula Rego’s retelling of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is harrowing. Here, presumably, Gregor Samsa comes back as a naked man with his legs and arms in the air, like an insect on its back. Half-eaten fruit and salad lie next to him, momentarily ignored. His eyes are closed, suggesting sleep, but the cushions are laid out as a cross, suggesting crucifixion. It is to me more disturbing to see a naked man, limbs flailing up like a flipped-over and helpless insect, rather than showing a giant cockroach. Read Kafka’s metamorphosis and recall the horrors of Gregor Samsa transformed and transforming into a giant cockroach, his human mind initially still working, him still being himself, but gradually metamorphosing as he was submerged and overwhelmed by his appetite as he smells the rotting food outside in the alleyway. Paul Rego speaks to Franz Kafka across time, adding another dimension to his masterpiece with her masterstrokes.

Retelling fairy tales and stories was one thread of Paula Rego’s work. Snow White and Her Stepmother is a disturbing piece about intimate relationships and humiliation – a stepmother should not help her stepdaughter with her knickers.  Her paintings of Pinocchio show a relationship that just feels wrong – there would be no problem with Geppetto washing a figurine and readying it for painting, but Pinocchio is depicted as a real boy, just like he is with the Blue Fairy whispering to him. In each of these, the beholder is left disturbed – the nakedness, the blue fairy’s hand touching Pinocchio’s leg, and Geppetto holding Pinocchio’s neck. Her works explore violence and betrayal, haunting and humiliating moments that talk of the ills of society. An artist can shout warnings of the injustices in the world. Here the shouting is subtle as all the faces are calm and this creates the uncomfortable tension between the visual and the message which worms its way under our skin. Art is far more than aesthetics, even if the colours attract the eye.

The role of women is also a repeated focus, as are the harsh realities of society, as seen by the grotesque giant puppet, Gluttony,  where the woman is so possessed she feeds off her children,  echoing the Greek myth of Chronos eating his children.

Oratorio presents us with a cabinet of horrors women face in a deeply dysfunctional society – depicting rape, seduction, solitude in pregnancy, social disgrace, unwanted births, from ambivalence to the baby to infanticide – one held upside down by the foot while the woman looks elsewhere; another two dumped in a grey bucket, another child flopped on his back, head lolling back, while one is held close, in sympathy or regret. This is not a cabinet of curiosities. This work, we are told, depicts women from eighteenth-century literature and folklore. Its angry shout reverberates to the present and will echo into the future, unfortunately resonating with reality. There is a whole novel in this dark set of paintings and puppets that would be deeply painful to read but shouldn’t be censored. 

Some of Paul Rego’s work is immediately disturbing; others take time to unsettle and unnerve the viewer. Sleeper (1994) shows a woman lying on a blazer,  an empty plate behind her. Is she being punished or cared for or stricken by grief?

There is, despite her building on folklore, fairy tales and literature, little joy in the works of Paula Rego. Hers is no Hollywood. But its power and unique voice should be lauded, and the messages heard and heeded.  Her work makes me think of the German narrative figurative painter Max Beckmann, who lived through Hitler’s dictatorship; Neo Rauch, the modern German social critic; as well as South Africa’s William Kentridge, who lived through apartheid.  Paula Rego grew up during Salazar’s dictatorship (which collapsed in 1974) until her parents sent her to the UK when she was 16. Rego, Beckman, Rauch and Kentridge painted narrative socio-political critical oeuvres replete with symbolism, each with a unique, powerful, critical voice – shouting out warnings to all who care to look.

There are, of course, many more parallels one could draw to other painters – e.g. Paula Regio’s prints with Goya’s Los Caprichos – and many more paintings (generally in pastel), engravings, puppets, and installations. I’ve only scraped the surface with these few words. See the links to Paul Rego and her work at the Venice Biennale, the online presentation of The Forgotten at Victoria Miro (following the earlier exhibition), The Tate, Cristea Roberts Gallery and Gallery Sofie Van de Velde; the exhibitions are all past, but that is one benefit of the internet. Hopefully, a major museum will soon dedicate a full retrospective in her honour.

L’article Paula Rego’s stories in pastel and puppets est apparu en premier sur Travel Tomorrow.