A Slice of Bright Space

It’s difficult to envisage our wild, nomadic life before the existence of architecture, perhaps even before the cave; a time when there was no concept of an outside because we hadn’t yet built an inside. Eventually when the walls did go up, we must have felt safer in our new, enclosed spaces – but we must also have mourned the loss of some of the things the wild had previously provided. Then, Bingo! The invention of the window. With the sunlight and fresh air let in, we were also of course, happily delivered of a view – but there is more… 

Imagine a late winter sun approaching the horizon. With its diminishing powers it can now only dimly light the room and yet some of this remaining light is somehow concentrated and channelled to form a bright rectangular, window-shaped ‘plane’ on the dull interior wall. Think about that vertically hanging slice of bright space. We must have noted it. We must have experienced a ‘high’ on seeing such an other-worldly presence inside our homes. Whatever we had discovered, it was a new and curious object for our imaginations. 

Implying that the first windows were responsible for an early, concrete experience of something approaching ‘the pictorial’ is perhaps not new – I’m not sure. However, I am sure that a material aperture cut into the wall can have impact, meaning and sensuality beyond any practical application – and this is the thought revisited when I was recently flicking through a book and saw a reproduction of Rene Magritte’s ‘La Condition Humaine’ – a painting about Painting; about perception, reality and difference.

‘La Condition Humaine’ shows a landscape painting propped on its easel, in front of a window. The ‘landscape’ on the easel partially overlaps and lines-up with the ‘landscape’ it depicts, – a scene through a window. All of this of course, is framed by the actual edge of the painting. This painting neatly diagrams concepts of ‘frame’ and the phrase ‘a painting within a painting’ is often used to describe a ‘theme’ of Magritte’s from this time. More importantly here, it is a reminder of the open window as a metaphor for Painting itself (a connection not lost on Leon Battista Alberti as long ago as 1436, in his influential treatise ‘On Painting’).

Paintings in this exhibition, such as ‘Slipslideshift’ and ‘Blushing Phantom’ by Ian Boutell and Richard Graville respectively, offer a direct engagement with Painting as sensual, material ‘objects’ of the imagination; extricated of obligation to narrative and representation, they embrace a ‘psycho-physical’ realm.

In curating this exhibition ‘Touch’ by Mali Morris was a painting that first prompted all these thoughts after seeing it on a studio visit. It exists not within an optical (and distancing) aesthetic, but one more governed by the forces at play when living and dreaming: a ‘slice of bright space’.

© Della Gooden, 2020

‘A Slice of Bright Space’ by Della Gooden was commissioned for the exhibition ‘Hard Painting x2’
at Phoenix Art Space, Brighton, 2020.

*images of ‘La Condition Humaine’ are not in the public domain but it can be
found in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington and can be viewed online at www.nga.gov