northern light

Alison Watt: The Sun Never Knew How Wonderful It Was, exh cat., Parafin, London, 2016

‘I have overcome the lining of the coloured sky, torn it down and into the bag thus formed, put colour, tying it up in a knot. Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you.’ - Kasimir Malevich, ‘Non-Objective Art and Suprematism’ (1919) 

‘I marvelled as much at the behaviour of light around the icebergs as I did at their austere, implacable progress through the water. They took their colour from the sun, and from the clouds and the water. But they also took their dimensions from the light: the stronger and more direct it was, the greater the contrast upon the surface of the ice, of the ice itself with the sea. And the more finely etched were the dull surfaces of the walls. The bluer the sky, the brighter their outline against it.’ - Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (1986)

White paintings. White walls. The fall of light. White light. Shapes, shadows, openings and closures. Alison Watt is attempting to do something very different to Malevich, whose rigorous abstraction aimed to purge the painting of objective content in order to reveal ‘infinity’. Nonetheless, her work does perhaps share something with Malevich, an invitation into the ‘white free abyss’

Watt’s paintings lead us each of us on a unique and personal journey through our own memories, emotions and associations. They allow each of us to tell our own stories about what it is we are looking at. It is an utterly subjective experience. Watt knows this. As she says in her interview with Anna McNay: ‘Your paintings are lost to you once they leave the studio… they’re open to interpretation.’ Moreover, she asserts, ‘The interpretation of my work is not something I necessarily want to control.’

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I’m fascinated by the ‘weather’ of these paintings, especially when seen en masse, as a body of work. Is it the knowledge that these works were inspired by the Venus Frigida (1614) of Rubens, that leads me to find them wintery, full of cold Northern light? And by ‘cold’ I don’t mean somehow disengaged or unemotional but want to infer the temperature of the images. For me the soft and sensuous folds of white fabric recall ice and snow. Arctic light, with its differing qualities of translucency and opacity. Light shining on snow and shining through snow. Different whites. Frost.

In 2015 the Venus Frigida was on loan from the collection of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp to the Royal Academy in London for the exhibition Rubens and His Legacy. Watt therefore had the opportunity to study it at length. The painting depicts the goddess of love in a cold, dark and wintry landscape. She has her back turned to the viewer and Cupid huddles beside her, struggling to keep warm. Rubens’ inspiration for the figure of Venus was a marble statue he had seen in Rome, and his extraordinary transposition of cold inert stone into voluptuous living flesh is a source of ongoing fascination for Watt. 

Her interrogation of the Rubens has led her in some unexpected directions. One of the most surprising new works in the exhibition is Bolt (2015). This is the first time a figure has appeared in her work since the 1990s. But in contrast to the nudes that Watt painted from life in the first decade of her career (and also the fleshy cherub she has used as a source) Cupid is rendered in monochrome. And the drapery which covers his head and shoulder, and which elsewhere in Watt’s work gives form, here seems to dissolve it. This cupid seems to be caught mid-metamorphoses, in the process of becoming air.

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White, but not white. One of the surprising things about this exhibition of seemingly white paintings is just how much colour there is in it. In Watt’s light-filled Edinburgh studio it is a surprise to discover her table-top palette, encrusted as it is with vivid yellows, reds and blues. And indeed, those colours are all in the paintings. There is no such thing as a ‘pure’ white here. Look closely and one sees in Iris (2014-15) a rosy tinge that recalls ‘alpenglow’, the late sunlight that washes the high mountains pink in the evening. Or in Venus (2015), the pale iridescence of glacial ice and the heavy slate blue of a winter sky

This is Alison Watt’s first exhibition in London since ‘Phantom’ at the National Gallery in 2008. And the ghosts that haunted that show – Ingres, Zurbaran and a host of other master painters– continue to inform her practice. Yet something has changed or shifted. Watt has described the way of working that these new paintings embodying as a process in which the familiar becomes something new and strange: ‘In the process of making a painting, things happen which you can't quite explain, small details become memorialised and what was familiar is unfamiliar. The image you thought you knew begins to move away from you until it becomes less about what you see and more about what lies inside, what you can only sense, feel or imagine.’ The transformation that Cupid appears to be undergoing suggests a wider transformation, the concrete becoming evanescent and unsubstantial, the familiar becoming mysterious.