Figurative Art | Richard Whincop

Contexts

The lofty environment of an Art Museum creates expectations that can shape the way we look at and respond to art. Classically inspired architecture creates a sense of grandeur, a formal theatricality that leads us to anticipate something elevated, edifying, even eternal: Art with a capital "A". The grouping and juxtaposition of works encourages us to "compare and contrast", while informative labels set works within a broader art historical context, seeing them as elements within a bigger picture. However, while this may open the door to a work of art, the true impact of a work of art is only felt when the immediate surroundings fade away, and the viewer's imagination enters and becomes absorbed by the work of art.

But what happens when you see a work of art in a completely different context, somewhere unusual or unexpected? Isolated from its familiar environment, it can take on a very different significance. In a natural setting, against a sea, a sky or a desert, a work of art can seem to arise from the interaction of elemental forces, like a fragile blossom; it can shine out like a vulnerable beacon of civilization - or perhaps strike us as the dramatic and momentary appearance of a gateway into another world. It can become an element of a dream, part of a mysterious and unexplained psychological situation.

Art Museums confer a sense of implacable permanence onto the works they house, deploying the architectural language of the temple to suggest that art belongs to the eternal realm of Heaven rather than to the ever-changing and at times volatile Earth. But they could be said to promise what they cannot deliver: for works of art remain earthly objects and it is not possible to enter the other-worlds that they represent. Paintings can be damaged, stolen or destroyed. Try to enter one and you come up with the hard and bruising fact of the picture surface. But in a painting of a painting this is not necessarily the case.

In the frame

A picture frame acts as a symbolic boundary between art and reality, between the world which we inhabit and another that we can see but cannot enter. But within the imaginary world of a painting a painted frame can become a gateway allowing passage between earthly and artistic realities. Figures in a painting are not bound by the same laws as us, and can move freely between realms painted in different styles, with apparently different laws. Objects can emerge from paintings and appear just as real as their surroundings. The world of a painting allows us to ask the question "What if... ?" and to transgress what we know to be inviolable natural laws.

Yet the impossibility of such scenarios reminds us that nothing in a painting is really real: we are led into a dream and then awakened from it. We are brought back to the tension between depth and flatness, to the paradox at the heart of painting: that which seems real does not really exist.

The iconoclastic icon

Art is in some ways an attempt to overcome the laws of nature, to seize and hold on to the transient moment that in our real experience slips through our fingers. But the tradition of the "Vanitas painting has also been used to bring us back to the very fact of this transience: "All is Vanity: nothing lasts". And this is true of art itself; however changeless it may seem it is, like we ourselves, subject to the ravages of time.

So art can leave us hovering between belief and unbelief. Sometimes, for a moment, it can succeed in persuading us that what it represents is real, like an icon that seems to possess life, to become the thing itself. Yet it can also remind us that it too is part of our ever-changing reality, to undermine the very illusion that it sets out to create. Ultimately, perhaps, its purpose is not to be anything more than it is, but to point towards something beyond itself, to offer us a glimpse of something greater while reminding us of our limits.