Frieze Masters Podcast 2024, Episode 3: The Power of Painting

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‘The viewer makes the painting alive. Without the viewer, that thing doesn't exist.’ – Shirazeh Houshiary 

What happens to our understanding of painting when we expand the canon across eras and cultures? In the third episode of the Frieze Masters Podcast, artist Shirazeh Houshiary, Director of the National Gallery Gabriele Finaldi and arts editor Jan Dalley reflect on the celebration and subversion of narrative through painting. 

Shirazeh Houshiary is an Iran-born, London-based artist, working in painting and sculpture; Gabriele Finaldi is Director of the National Gallery in London; and Jan Dalley is the former Arts Editor at the Financial Times.

About Frieze Masters Podcast

The Frieze Masters Podcast is back for 2024, bringing you the annual Frieze Masters Talks programme recorded during this year’s fair. The series of seven discussions was curated by Sheena Wagstaff and Shanay Jhaveri, with the title ‘The Creative Mind’, and features 21 intergenerational and international speakers exploring how the art of the past can help make sense of the present.

The series includes topics ‘The State We’re In’, ‘The Faces of Community’ and ‘The Power of Painting’, with speakers ranging from artists – Nairy Baghramian, Jeremy Deller, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Shirazeh Houshiary, Mark Leckey, Glenn Ligon, Ming Smith – to curators such as Gabriele Finaldi, Glenn Lowry and Victoria Siddall, plus writers, thinkers, architects and politicians. 

Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Frieze Masters Talks programme and the Frieze Masters Podcast are brought to you by Frieze in collaboration with dunhill.

Further Information

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^{Main Image: Courtesy of Shirazeh Houshiary}

Episode Transcript

Jan Dalley: Here we are, the power of painting, quite a big subject. While we were discussing the possibilities of this topic, Shirazeh said something that we all found quite provocative and interesting. So we decided we would pitch in straight away with that, which was her view that painting is more about structure than about narrative. 

I’m going to start off by asking you to respond briefly to that proposition about structure versus narrative in painting and we’ll take it from there. So Shirazeh, would you like to start off with your idea?

Shirazeh Houshiary: Well, I felt that narrative changes through history. We don’t have the same narrative that we had, let’s say, in 16th century, 15th century and so on. But what does not change is emotional response. So, for example, when you look at the beautiful painting by Leonardo [da Vinci] in the National Gallery, Madonna on the Rock, the narrative of that, it belongs to another time, it is not really connected to my time, but the painting carries a huge amount of structure, which creates the emotional response from the viewer. And those emotional responses are timeless. There are things like love, beauty, hate, vulnerability. Those are the things that cannot be described by the narrative part of the painting. 

So, there’s something else in the painting, which I call structure. Maybe this word is not correct, but I don’t know any other word for it, but it is what gives the painting a felt experience. And those felt experiences are what we connect to. And as an artist, I spend my life looking at painting and I don’t look at painting just briefly and just go home. I spend hours and hours and hours studying a painting because if they connect to me, and I want to understand it deeply, how this is working. What is it about this painting? Because, for example, many people have painted the veil of Saint Veronica. But what is it about [Francisco de] Zurbarán’s that becomes so unique? And I seek that through its structure. 

Gabriele Finaldi: So, um, it’s fascinating to put those things in opposition to one another because I suppose what artists are always looking for is some way to make structure and narrative work together. And I guess the works of art that we consider to be most successful are those where narrative and structure overlay and align and come together and become something, uh, unified and special. I suppose you approach it very much as an artist. I approach it as a curator, director, whose job it is to try and mediate between the works that are exhibited and the public who comes to see, and often narrative is the easiest way to do it. What’s the thing about? What’s it telling us? What’s the story? Why is that story important? And there’s a risk that you’re saying things that are only relevant to a kind of small bit of the work of art or are not at all the concerns of the artist when we talk about them.

So, there’s this constant kind of questioning when we’re presenting a work of art, trying to mediate between the work of art and the public as to, you know, what are the relevant things we should be saying? Are there lots of other approaches as well? And often to talk about structure and I think you’re intending structure in the broadest possible sense. We’re not just talking about the structure of a work of art in terms of its perspective or its linearity, whereas you’re talking about emotion, you’re talking about intellect. And then there’s the part that we bring as well to the work of art. So, we bring our lived experience to the work of art. And I think you’re quite right. We experience the work of art in a quite different way from people from earlier times. Although we can imaginatively sort of put ourselves in the place, trying to reconstruct what are the emotions attached to a particular work of art from a different period. I think that’s a very important effort we need to make. 

SH: I want to talk about [Jacopo] Pontormo. Pontormo said something very profound. A painting, you look at the painting, it’s just a canvas, a ground and a pigment. It has no, nothing, the materiality of it is not important. Who gives it meaning is the viewer. The viewer makes the painting alive. Without the viewer that thing doesn’t exist. You can put a cat in front of a painting. What does it mean? So, it is the viewer that gives meaning to the painting because that thing is a relationship, that space is a space between the viewer and the work of art. It transcends the artist because the artist becomes a viewer too. I always felt, when I finish a painting, I’m a viewer.

GF: So, here’s a question for you which is provocative: in the kind of constellation of meanings around the work of art, how important is your opinion or your view as the creator of the work of art? 

SH: It’s only one opinion amidst millions of other opinions and they’re all relevant because we make a relationship. A work of art is about a relationship. It’s almost alive. Like you make a relationship with a person. Many people make those relationships, and they’re all relevant. All those meanings have a place. So, I don’t really think this dogmatic view to think that this is the only way to look. It’s what I, uh, consider a living experience for a work of art because we go to see a work like I went to, uh, Dongguan in the west of China and these works are created completely under different circumstances. And what I make today, it’s my relationship that almost brings to life something in me. Otherwise, those things have no meaning. 

GF: Sure. And there’s also that sense that you as an artist, when you created your work of art, there is a moment where you kind of separate yourself from it. It’s almost as if you’ve got a boat, you’ve launched it. It takes its own journey. And in a sense, as it gets further away from you, even in time, you know, your own particular view of what it was, your own sets, your own kind of sets of meanings that were associated with it, uh, are diffused and it becomes something else. It transforms. 

SH: And I think we have to respect that. That’s the beauty. That’s the power of any work of art. 

JD: Well, you spoke about the Zurbarán. 

SH: Well, Zurbarán painted The Veil of Saint Veronica, uh, many versions, and in most of the versions you could see the face, uh, more frontal and very expressive. But when he gets to the older age, and I always found artists when they get older, somehow, they are freer. They don’t care about what anybody else thinks. And that’s what we talked about. That’s very important. So, they become more free and open. And that openness is very valuable. You know, he knows how to paint a face. He knows exactly what to do, but he’s painting it. And it’s so powerful. 

When I saw this – because I was given the opportunity to do the window of the St Martin-in-the-Fields – I suddenly felt that that tilt of head on that beautiful way that he painted the fabric. The fabric is painted with all its folds, with all its uh, uh, structure. It’s so beautifully painted and yet the face is almost as if it is embedded. It’s not painted, it’s embedded, it’s part of the cloth. So of course this is, we go back to the narrative because this is very much part of Christian story, but I think for me, this transcends that. It is about how we see ourselves, really, how we see our own conscious mind, where we are in relation to that space. And it’s not just a story of Christ on Calvary. Of course it is. Of course, for Zurbarán it was. But for me, it communicates another level. So, I just found that tilt of head, the three-quarter profile was very powerful, and you don’t need the face. And I, James Gibbs, which did the building for the St Martin-in-the-Fields, used a lot of this oval in the architecture. And I was already wanting to use this oval. And I just suddenly tilted that oval. The moment I tilted the oval, it created a tension in the warp and weft of the structure of the window. And that’s created the cross, which people saw it as agony of cross, but scientists have seen it as also a black hole in some ways. It’s that distortion of space and time. So, what I’m trying to say is already I found that this is my, relationship with that painting. I already found the whole universe, the whole cosmos in that painting of Zurbarán. So, I think this relationship, a work of art really at its best, what I call structure, is those felt experience, those little movement, that suddenly you feel an emotional connection to that work of art. Those little movement, it is movement, something that just, it’s like a piece of music. You don’t, you can’t even describe it. Very often I think art historians fail to do that because how can you describe a movement? 

GF: I find this discussion very interesting because a contemporary of Zurbarán, who’s Francisco Pacheco, who’s a civilian writer on the arts and a painter as well, he manages not to mention Zurbarán at all during his, uh, during his, in his, in his book called The Art of Painting. He obviously didn’t want to give him any protagonism at all, but what he does say is that the principal purpose of painting is to raise the minds of believers to God. He says that that’s the main reason why we do painting and very interestingly, you know, you’re, you’re very aware when you produce something like that, that generations of churchgoers and people who are going to the concerts and to listen to talks and so on will be looking at your work and your work, you know, you’ve just said that, you know, that you’ve had some scientists look at it and they’re talking about the space-time continuum and the way in which this leads you to sort of cosmic thoughts, which is not that different from what Pacheco was saying about works of art sort of raising the mind to thoughts of heavenly things.

SH: I think this is the essence of who we are. We seek for those things and the work of art at its most powerful level can do that. And not always does that. And that’s not the narrative. It is not the story of Christ on the road to Calvary. This is something else. Of course he uses the narrative. Um, I have nothing against the narrative, but it’s narrative with some emotional content, that emotional content, it’s what the creative mind has, that’s the root of it. And we have to grasp that, not just a narrative. It’s a felt experience.

GF: So, I think there’s something that kind of fits in between those two, if I may say so. And I think Zurbarán rather amazingly is an artist who has a lot of thoughts on that topic and that is the way in which art can be about art as well as about being what it’s about, as it were, or about the narrative. So he’s a very sort of meta artist for the 17th century. And interestingly, so is [Diego] Velázquez and so is [Bartolomé Esteban] Murillo. You know, artists who are essentially, you know, working for the court, working for the church in the middle of the 17th century. They all have this sense that what they’re doing, in addition to its meaning at one level, is also exploring the nature of art. When Zurbarán paints the imprint of, of the face of Christ on the cloth, he’s thinking about, you know, how do you actually produce art? And, uh, art in this case is something which is miraculous, because the image is miraculous. He sort of imprinted itself on the cloth, which has then subsequently become a famous relic and is revered and is, uh, honoured, uh, and so on. Um, and of course he’s painted it himself. So, there’s this kind of ever, uh, sort of revolving, uh, circle of, uh, sort of technical meaning almost. 

JD: Yes. And he has all the trompe-l’oeil effect here as well. Yeah. And, uh, you, in fact, chose a Zurbarán image as well. 

GF: So, um, I chose this because, and I didn’t know that you’d made a film on it and I’m really interested to hear your, your thoughts on it. It’s about life-size and it’s a picture that came into the National Gallery’s collection about, um, about 20, 25 years ago or so. And it’s nothing more than a cup on a saucer with a, with a rose, but that doesn’t do it justice. That doesn’t even remotely begin to do this, uh, justice. And it’s something that seems to be constantly suggesting other things. So it’s almost like a kind of prism. It’s almost not the work itself which is significant, but it’s what the work itself is sort of pushing you to think about in lots of different directions. And having just joined the collection relatively recently, it is a picture that’s sort of exercised a certain spell on visitors and curiously enough, a certain spell on artists who are constantly referring to this picture. 

SH: Well for me, well I mean I’ve been in love with this picture for a very long time and I’ve got it, I go and look at it at the National Gallery and I’ve got picture of it all over my studio. It’s everywhere and in the end I thought, well, what I want to do is I’m going to make a 3D printing of this work. So I went and I got involved with a 3D printer and I made the cup. I made the plate exactly as Zurbarán would have painted these and the objects were amazing because nothing seems to be symmetrical. They were very thin. Everything looked very unreal because when you look at it, you don’t understand it. But once you make it, you really understand this is something not real. It’s not rendering reality. So, we have to really understand this is not just a cup, and it’s not just a plate, and it’s not just a rose. 

Then I was thinking, what is it? I know this, this image represents annunciation in some ways in within the Christian mythology. I mean, this is another version of annunciation. It’s the rose, it’s the purity of the water and so on. But for me, you know, I live in 21st century, that annunciation and all that maybe has different meaning. So I was just contemplating this painting. I spent a long time looking at it and looking at it. And then I realized what he’s done, at least in relation to my thought is juxtaposing what we make, a man-made object with a natural phenomenon. The rose and the water is the nature. And somehow, he finds a beautiful equilibrium. The way he paint the water, the way he paint the rose, the way he paint even the strange cup, which the handles are not symmetrical. If you put them on the thing, when I made it, I just saw, wow, this is not really what it seems to be. You know, the handles are in the wrong place. You couldn’t even use that cup. So I realized, this is about something else. This is about the imperfection of us and the perfection of natural world. And then I thought to myself, I want to make a film about something to do with the way we are now confronting natural world. Because our relationship with nature has become very blurred and disastrous in some ways. We have no relationship. So I made a, uh, animation film. It’s about five minutes. And it has to be seen within a, a room which is an oval shape. The oval is broken because everything about this is broken. So the oval is broken and one curve, very big, huge curve wall we have. Which we, which I project a film and the other one is a curve wall that people sit, but they are in a broken space because they can go out. They are not in a room. I didn’t want people to be in a room. I wanted to be able to get out of both sides. 

And then the film is, I animated the water. It drips. It fills the cup. It becomes so intense that it cannot take it anymore. So the cup shatters. When the cup shatters, the rose pulverizes. And when the rose pulverizes, this little cup becomes full of water. It actually becomes an ocean. It’s just like where we are right now in our history. We are going to be submerged because we have no ability to really embrace nature and to create that equilibrium. It’s quite a meditative film. It’s very slow. It’s like everything, it moves very, very slowly, the same pace as Zurbarán has painted this painting. And I’ve used Arvo Pärt music on this film. So everything is repeated, everything is, and what is very telling is at the end there is nothing there. It’s just a black ocean, nothingness.

GF: You know, this is a cup of water with a rose, and you’ve got us thinking about um, you know, the future of humanity. You got us thinking about our relationship with nature. You got, uh, you got us thinking about, you know, our place in the cosmos. It’s astonishing what a picture like this, in the mind of an artist like you, can begin to talk about.

SH: But that’s why Pontormo said, a painting come alive when it has a viewer. Without a viewer, the painting doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t matter whether Zurbarán agrees with me or not. It’s beyond, it’s not because he lives in another time. He did his, he left this for me to have, to have my imagination to, to, to be able to really use that. And what I love about this is, also the darkness, the way that, I mean, this is, again, very special about Zurbarán, that very often his images, even Agnus Dei, which is one of my favourite paintings. It’s all black. Everything is emerged out of darkness. And that darkness is like returning us back to the beginning, to the origin, to the place where we belong to, to that nothingness. Not nothingness. Emptiness. 

GF: We certainly don’t know what Zurbarán thought of that picture because the documentation on Zurbarán when you’re an art historian who’s working in the archives and on the biographies and so on. You know, we know when he bought a mule. We know that, you know, he bought a little piece of land. We know that he had a fight with his neighbour. And that’s the extent of what we know about the artist. 

JD: That’s all we know. 

GF: To kind of take these works and make them kind of rise up like that is just fantastic. 

JD: Gabriele, could I take you back to possibly another, um, another way of thinking about the power of painting, which is the eternal question of how you assess the quality of a work. I mean, Shirazeh is completely right, that nothing happens with pigment on canvas except in us, except if, if the power of the painting is, is felt by the viewer. But of course, it is something that endlessly we do need to assess somehow, and we do need to, to think about. And you as a, as a director and art historian and curator, you actually have to adjudicate on this sometimes. 

GF: Talk about quality. It’s become more difficult nowadays. I think we’ve kind of problematized the issue of quality to an extent where it’s... 

JD: We have, but it doesn’t mean we’ve stopped doing it, does it? 

GF: No, not at all. And we are in an art fair, and this is a selling fair. And, you know, in the end, people are going to decide whether something is worth the money that’s being asked for it and so on.

So I’m showing you this picture because we acquired this at the National Gallery about, um, I think six, six years ago. It’s a work by Artemisia Gentileschi, painted by her in the 1610s. It’s a self-portrait as Saint Catherine, so she’s holding the palm of martyrdom and the Catherine wheel on which her martyrdom was attempted in the end. The narrative tells us that there was a lightning bolt from heaven and the torture wheel exploded. That’s why it’s usually shown broken. But, um, this is an artist who, who wasn’t represented in the national collection. An artist in whom, uh, you know, we’ve become very, very interested in the last 30 years, I would say. And so if she was going to be represented in the national collection, how were we going to assess what was the right picture? And of course, you know, she’s an artist who’s already represented in museums. So her most important pictures basically are already in public collection. So this emerged at a sale in France. It was an unknown picture and immediately when we saw it, we thought, this is, this is a very representative work of hers. It’s also a self-portrait. And of course, part of the interest in the artist is very much bound up with her biography. We know quite a lot about her and that’s all very relevant. And her own self-presentation as Catherine of Alexandria, who’s an early Christian philosopher who challenges the, the sort of pagan philosophers of the, of the Court of Alexandria and wins is also kind of very relevant to Artemisia’s own story, and very interesting as a kind of narrative for our time. 

So, all of those things come together, um, with the fact that the picture is also in a very good physical condition, which I think is another element that we need to consider as, as museum, uh, people. And so, uh, we, we went ahead and acquired the picture. And of course, there too, like you were saying before, it sort of takes on a life of its own, and people begin to use it in all sorts of different ways. It’s used in, in talks, it’s, uh, it’s gone on tour to different places where it’s been presented in quite different ways. We, we took it to the Glasgow Women’s Library. We took it to women’s prison down in, in Send in, uh, in Surrey. We took it to a doctor’s surgery in York. In each of those places, it had a sort of different meaning, it had a different, uh, emphasis. The same picture, the same piece of canvas, with the same marks on it, um, sort of starts moving in all sorts of different directions, and starts to become meaningful for people who apply their own narrative to it, the narrative of their own lives, uh, to it. I mean, it was moving to hear, you know, that we never saw their faces, but we heard the voices of the women prisoners in Send who were saying, well, you know, knowing the story, seeing the picture, it’s given me a lot of courage. It’s given me a lot of hope for the future and so on. And those are the kinds of things that I think are really inspiring when you see that a picture in a national collection can, can do those sorts of things. 

JD: And you wanted to talk about a picture from a completely different tradition, Chinese tradition. So what we’ve got here is, um...

SH: Shitao. 

JD: Shitao.

SH: Uh, he’s, uh, this is also a self-portrait, by the way, but it’s just a different culture. And Shitao was a Chinese painter, which lived at the end of, uh, 17th century, 18th, early 18th century. He lived during the Ming dynasty. And, uh, he, at that time, they were taken over by the Qing dynasty. So there was a lot of violence and the whole city was destroyed. And he was from a, uh, aristocratic background. And he, these kind of people very often became a wanderer in the mountains because they realised that there is so much destruction and inhumanity, which we all experience one way or another in our lives or whatever. So they became wanderer. And they would live in a Zen Buddhist monastery.

And the act of painting and calligraphy and poetry was a way for them to reveal their mind. And that is very different. They were not – so in this painting, you have got two figures standing on the edge of a cliff, looking into the space, infinity. That space is called, I mean, it’s a landscape which is made out of some kind of misty seascape. It doesn’t have any form. The clouds are like a dragon. So it’s like this landscape of vast and deepness. It’s almost like you are in front of a presence, a universal, a large presence, and yet on the corner, there’s a poem. And of course we can’t read that poem, but there’s this beautiful book, I mean, this is actually an exquisite book, it’s written by David Hinton, and it’s called A Story of Existence. And he translated this poem. The poet, his name was Inkstone Wanderer, because these are all wanderers. And so he went around, because with ink, and he wrote his poem. And the poem says, the wall of the city has been destroyed. The city is crumbled and is in ruin. All the gardens and the orchard are abandoned. And when you look at this painting, I can’t see any ruin, I can’t see any city wall that has been destroyed. It’s quite enigmatic. This painting is very mysterious.

So you think what it is about, then you realise that actually the painting is not about somebody standing, looking into the beautiful landscape. The painting is rendering the mind of Shitao. It’s his mind. It’s equivalent of painting the mind, not painting what you see. It’s the interior landscape. This is completely different from what we have seen up to now. This is another way of dealing with a work of art, which has really touched me. I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this painting. And what is this mind? This is like returning back to that origin, to that place where there is no division between absence and presence, because both exist in this painting. The poem is telling you about the presence of the event, but there is absence too. There is absence and presence. There is a creative force and destructive force. All the polarity seems to be melt here to one. So it’s like he has discovered this, uh, the cosmological tissue of existence. This is what this painting does. 

So I think this is so powerful when you look at it. I mean, it’s not about anything that we have spoken. It’s something completely different. It’s about returning back to the origin, to where we don’t have the constructed self, what I call constructed self, because we all have tradition, name, nationality, culture, religion. Those are all our constructed self. To get rid of that, this is what this painting is about. Open up to something like, when you, when you are at the beginning of your life, when you are a child, you’re free, you’re open. You have no knowledge of those things. And that freedom, that openness, is found. I mean, this is very much a Zen way of thinking that you know, you go back to the origin, to the beginning, to where we have no name. We have no culture. We have no – and then this exists in poetry as well.

If you look at, for example, Keats, Keats is an English poet who says, a poet doesn’t have identity because when we have identity, we are separated from each other. But when I don’t have identity, I am open to embrace everybody inside me, the whole universe to be found inside me. And this is what this painting is about. And I found it and I juxtapose it with my own painting, which is reverse of that. In a way, I don’t usually do figurative work. My work is very abstract. But here you know, the figuration starts emerging. But it is like the sky, the emptiness of the sky becomes the image, becomes the form. So it’s the reverse. So it’s that emptiness, that nothingness, is the shape of what things are. 

JD: We search for imagery though, in there. Don’t we? We search for creatures in the clouds, for example, and, uh, our minds want to do that, don’t they? And we search for – to add figuration and that’s something that I know you’ve spoken about a lot.

GF: The desire to find sense and meaning is so profoundly embedded in our being that it’s not surprising that we want to make sense of things which are apparently, uh, random. But, um, it’s a subject I became quite interested in a few years ago, which is the way in which artists represent clouds and it’s a proper subject actually. There is a bit of literature on this. And it is a subject on which Leonardo has some things to say and various other artists. And it’s partly to do with the way, you know, what is the origin of making art in the first place? Well, in the Renaissance, a lot of artists had the notion that the first artist is nature herself, natura. And nature creates works of art through action in the universe. And this is connected with Leonardo’s statements on making images out of randomness. So he talks about, you know, taking a sponge, throwing it against the wall. Uh, and the image that it creates then sort of forming itself in the viewer’s mind, sometimes with some help from the artist, into an army marching across a landscape. 

Or in the case of this little panel by [Andrea] Mantegna, which is a Saint Sebastian who’s in the process of being martyred, where, if you look at the clouds at upper left, they’ve turned into a, a rider. It’s the kind of randomness of clouds that take up, uh, a recognisable shape to our eyes. And of course, depending how we’re culturally conditioned, they take up very different sorts of, uh, of images. They’re also, um, diaphanous and momentary. 

How many times has it happened when you’ve looked at the clouds and recognised something and you turn to your neighbour and say, can you see? And of course, it’s gone and, uh, they can’t see it anymore. So there’s that sense of something which is constantly being created and recreated in our own, uh, experience and, you know, Mantegna does this in a very interesting way. And, um, you can look at his works and quite often find things, very, very interesting things going on in the clouds. If you get into, um, sort of cloud interpretation on the internet, uh, you will be there for the next week. There’s some really fascinating and really weird stuff on the internet about, uh, looking at, looking at cloud shapes. 

SH: Yeah, a lot of artists, I mean, Turner, I mean, Constable, I mean, they’re all painted clouds. I mean, cloud is like the first painters. I mean, this is the first way, I mean, for me was the painting I showed you and the other one was the sky, the emptiness of the sky becomes the image. The cloud forms and makes the, the empty, because all the figures I have ever made are in blue. So as if the emptiness is the image. The absence is the image, not the presence. It’s the other way around, that’s what I was trying to do, express. But anyway, I think it, a cloud is a very fascinating thing because they also show our own state of being because everything is transient about even our own existence. 

JD: Yes, well, should we have a look at, um, the third um pair of images that you brought? Once again, a painting that inspired you very directly, and this is Andrea del Castagno’s The Last Supper, an astonishing image that shows that the tablecloth of the Last Supper is like a white bar of light right across the middle of the picture. So it’s an astonishing composition, really. Very, very bizarre in many ways. 

SH: Well, I was asked to do the altar for the St Martin-in-the-Fields and then I made a trip to Tuscany. And this is in a chapel, this is Andrea del Castagno’s Last Supper, it’s in a chapel and it’s actually quite amazing. It’s very big. This is a fresco, a huge fresco. And the way that this tablecloth, it divides the space, it creates a stage. You have the, the Christ and all the other side is the sitting on one side of the stage and this side is Judas and all of us, because the viewer becomes automatically Judas when you go there, because you feel that you are really standing in this division. So this division I found quite fascinating because it really defined a space. And I wanted to make an altar which would define my space in the, in the, space of the church. But what I was really fascinated also with the marking on the stone at the back, which is like if you see behind the Christ, is the wound. Every marking on the stone, it represent those state of being. And so I want, I realised that I need to seek the wound in the stone. So, I went and I searched for Travertine, also which comes from Rome and is the colour of bone. It’s like the wound is in the stone. It’s in the sedimentation of the, with the layering of the stone. So you use the natural world to bring the story to us rather than used by my hand. So the wound is in the stone already. It’s the way that the sedimentation create that wound. And if you go close to this altar when you are there, you will see that there is almost like a figure lying as a shadow in this stone, and it gives you that sense that there is an image, everywhere you go there are image, everywhere you go there are stories. 

It is actually very similar to people who were in the cave in Lascaux and you know they went in darkness and then they would suddenly see the bison coming out, or, it was in the rocks. So the rocks tell the story. So something similar. And then I carved inside this, uh, stone. I made the top of it very thin, like a skin, because bone and skin is the – the altar is made out of bone and skin, if there is an altar. I mean, this was my source of inspiration, and I’m trying to say it’s all about the structure of the painting, the way that tablecloth cut the composition, the way those stones tell the story of the, and the way, you know, it’s actually very abstract in some ways. 

JD: Yes, it is. But somehow we still that, you know, there is still the notion of narrative going on. I mean, you were saying the hidden figure, um, we are more and more interested now, aren’t we? About the narrative of the artist and the story behind the creator of the work. And this sometimes it seems to me, overwhelms our perception of the work itself. Um, is that something that concerns you? 

GF: Well, I, it’s, it’s a, I think it’s a, it’s always a, an interesting challenge. Going back to what you were saying before about what, what do you actually say about a work of art? I mean, I’ve sometimes created the story of, um, Annibale Carracci who, um, when he’s painting with his brother, the Farnese Gallery ceiling, his brother was very chatty and very sociable. And his brother brought people onto the, onto the scaffolding to see the work. And he’d sort of be pontificating about what they were doing and how great it was and all that. And Annibale, who’s the real artist of the two of them and doing all the hard work, um, is sort of quietly in the corner. And he turns around, he says noi altri pittori parliamo con i pennelli, we painters speak with our brushes. We don’t need to blab about what we’re doing. And, um, but there is that sense. We’re, we’re always very interested in what the artist has to say about their own works of art. And of course we can’t with many artists in the past. We often didn’t know who they are. They didn’t write anything. 

So that, that, that sense of what can we say about, uh, a work of art. And the risk is that we don’t have the instruments to speak intelligently or perceptively about a work of art. So, we fall back on the biography of the artist. It’s quite interesting to look at entries in catalogues and you think, well, I want to know about the work of art and I’m not being told anything. I’m being told the biography of the artist, you know, where the artist was born and who was their teacher and all that kind of thing. So I think we also need to kind of develop a more refined discourse to be able to, to talk about works of art, to communicate about works of art. I know artists make works of art because if they wanted to speak about it, they wouldn’t make a work of art, they’d speak about it. So the work of art is something distinctive from speaking about a work of art, but there is a connection and it’s important as we communicate with each other, that we try and elaborate some kind of discourse, some kind of language about works of art because they often can open up very, uh, mysterious, uh, areas and, uh, they can open up experience and they can open up relationship.

JD: That’s a pretty brilliant way to pause this fascinating discussion about the power of painting. Thank you very, very much everybody for, um, listening and thank you to my wonderful panellists.