Artists' Artists: Daniel Sinsel

I chose two works: a not-very-well-known painting, attributed to Filippino Lippi, Allegoria dell’Amore, and an untitled work by Francis Alÿs. Both paintings depict animals as their protagonists acting out human emotions: love on hooves and camaraderie on paws. Lippi’s is an allegory of love between a male and female deer purified by a unicorn; Alÿs’s carries its symbolism more lightly, poetically located somewhere between a proverb-rendered-visual and an observation of a fleeting everyday moment. Stray dogs’ tails interlocking could be a coincidental transient connection or a stand-in for an oath of loyalty to see each other through precarity. In both works, the elegant hocks, antlers or tails of light-footed animals create ornamental lines. In the older painting, these are outshone by two winding ribbons, which seem to pervade the landscape like a soundtrack. To make a painting is like a negotiation: relationships between its components are defined by pushing around sticky paint. I respond to paintings that employ restraint: they carefully delineate, and at times secure, dynamic paths for feelings to permeate – as if the rawness of the emotion were too much to bear. It seems a good idea that the beeswax in Alÿs’s painting and the oil and resin in Lippi’s work keep them bound together as long as the paintings exist.