Alison Watt: Phantom
The National Gallery
London, England
12 March – 22 June 2008

by Rea Cris

Scottish artist Alison Watt is the seventh and youngest artist in residence at the National Gallery in London and, after two years, “Phantom” is a much-anticipated exhibition. It seems to centre around two paintings that were of pivotal importance to the exhibit and Watt’s career: Ingres’s “Madame Moitessier”, where she is equally impressed by the fabric as by the woman and Francisco de Zurbaran’s “St. Francis in Meditation”, which greets you at the entrance of the exhibit.

The snippets of images presented in the media looked fantastical and got my creative juices flowing. I wanted to like it, I really did, but I was so disappointed. The reproductions have caused detrimental effects to this exhibition. The reproductions make the folds and drapes look life-like and we marvel that this was painted by human hands. What we also tend to forget is that the camera does occasionally lie and does tend to make things look more streamlined than they really are. Observer journalist Kate Kellaway described her sensation when walking into the room as “unlike the elation one feels on seeing snow” (The Observer | Review 16.03.08 page 19 “Adventures in a material world” by Kate Kellaway). I too anticipated the brilliance of crisp white, but instead was met with a muddle of grey, and bleakness, the room hardly providing any light. When I gazed at the paintings, gone was the awe I felt when seeing the reproductions, I could easily make out the brush strokes, easily make out where one shade commenced and the other faded. I could easily see this was made, painstaking, meticulously, but nonetheless constructed and built. The paint itself seemed laborious and tired; the knots hanging, the crevasses yawning. Yes, there was a resemblance of orifices and sexual connotations, but it was predictable and not shocking or challenging. I felt that if I touched the painted objects I would get my fingered sticky with dirtied white paint. It would feel thick, sluggish and fatty. I wanted so badly to be sweep away by these paintings and stood in front of them, almost pleading to reveal their hidden wonders to me, but there was nothing to reveal. They had been too hyped up, too well photographed, too much talked about that they could not deliver what was promised.

www.inglebygallery.com
www.natinalgallery.org.uk

Tonya says:
It is interesting in our age of constant and mundane reproduction that the potential imbued into the representation gives it more aura than the actual work. We fabricate in our minds the idea of the real to life work as being so much more than the representation – in this case to the detriment of the piece in reality.

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