1 00:00:07,980 --> 00:00:13,230 So I'd like to begin with a story of art crossing borders. 2 00:00:13,230 --> 00:00:22,650 It concerns a man, an artist who grows up in a provincial town at the shores of a vast and powerful empire. 3 00:00:22,650 --> 00:00:32,040 He recognises his vacation in his early 20s, but conditions in his homeland they're advancing cannot keep up with his ideas. 4 00:00:32,040 --> 00:00:37,320 So after years of study, he leaves home keeping inside of him. 5 00:00:37,320 --> 00:00:43,560 Much of what he learnt and he travels overseas. He paints, he experiments. 6 00:00:43,560 --> 00:00:49,230 He lives in other places, other cities. And as he moves, his work develops. 7 00:00:49,230 --> 00:00:56,580 He comes to understand that where previously he had been repeating others use of material and technique, 8 00:00:56,580 --> 00:01:03,300 if he is to express what he wants to, he must push his materials further beyond their limits. 9 00:01:03,300 --> 00:01:13,680 His art becomes explosive, shedding conventions using matter to go beyond itself towards the spiritual a synthesis, 10 00:01:13,680 --> 00:01:18,900 as he once wrote of the real and the super real. 11 00:01:18,900 --> 00:01:25,950 This artist whose trajectory I sketch is not psychogenic, though it could well be, 12 00:01:25,950 --> 00:01:33,660 is in fact El Greco, the late 16th and early 17th century painter or an increase. 13 00:01:33,660 --> 00:01:39,870 He spent his twenties in Venice and Rome before settling finally in Toledo, 14 00:01:39,870 --> 00:01:46,440 and who has provided us with some of our definitive images of transcendent experience. 15 00:01:46,440 --> 00:01:53,460 Toledo shimmers under the heavens on hills as wet, vaporous as the sky. 16 00:01:53,460 --> 00:02:00,960 They can't of gaze is buried in his earthly finery, surrounded by a raft of local notables. 17 00:02:00,960 --> 00:02:06,360 His gilded armour glistens against a Christ like white sling. 18 00:02:06,360 --> 00:02:14,970 His arms and legs are so heavy that they force for St Stephen's, carrying them to bend almost double. 19 00:02:14,970 --> 00:02:26,550 The tassel from Stephen's cassock brushes his armour with a kind of visceral effect, bringing home the tang of metal against soft fabric. 20 00:02:26,550 --> 00:02:31,650 But what has always struck fear is more than the triumph of naturalistic observation. 21 00:02:31,650 --> 00:02:37,200 Taking place in the painting's bottom half is the ghostly riot of abstract, 22 00:02:37,200 --> 00:02:48,000 elongated figures that sit above on rafts of dirty cloud upturned faces bathed in Christ's spectral light. 23 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:58,950 These figures, who see him as they ascends to free themselves and the demands of accurate figuration pose a set of questions, perhaps unanswerable. 24 00:02:58,950 --> 00:03:05,370 Everybody knows that in pushing his art beyond nature further and further towards abstraction, 25 00:03:05,370 --> 00:03:10,800 El Greco is trying as he aged to paint the invisible saiga. 26 00:03:10,800 --> 00:03:23,460 Jiang shares his goal. He acknowledges this. It is the reason for the beguiling set of paintings begun in 2016, titled In Search of El Greco. 27 00:03:23,460 --> 00:03:32,820 Everybody knows what El Greco is after. Yes, but what he actually succeeded in visualising has always been less certain. 28 00:03:32,820 --> 00:03:38,820 We are well beyond the opinions of those 19th century connoisseurs for whom his rejection 29 00:03:38,820 --> 00:03:46,050 of naturalism was the simple result of a lack of facility of quote execrable drawing. 30 00:03:46,050 --> 00:03:52,530 As Sir Henry, layered trustee of our own National Gallery, once put it, likewise, 31 00:03:52,530 --> 00:04:00,750 the theories explained his work away as the emanations of a mystic or visionary have been rightly dismissed. 32 00:04:00,750 --> 00:04:05,580 So what exactly do these ghostly, elongated figures mean? 33 00:04:05,580 --> 00:04:12,910 Do they really claim to capture and represent divinity to render the invisible visible? 34 00:04:12,910 --> 00:04:14,560 I am not so sure. 35 00:04:14,560 --> 00:04:23,860 Nor was the philosopher Gilles de Leurs, who saw in the chaotic jumble of figures that crowd the top half of the burial of the countable guys. 36 00:04:23,860 --> 00:04:32,620 The beginnings of a painterly tradition that renounces precisely all claim to capture and represent the divine. 37 00:04:32,620 --> 00:04:37,520 A properly pictorial atheism is what he called it. I'll quote him at some length. 38 00:04:37,520 --> 00:04:44,590 So he says the figures are lifted up or doubled over or contorted, freed from all figuration. 39 00:04:44,590 --> 00:04:52,570 They no longer have anything to represent or the right since in this domain, they are content to refer to the existing code of the church. 40 00:04:52,570 --> 00:04:56,920 Thus, in themselves, they no longer have to do with anything but sensations. 41 00:04:56,920 --> 00:05:04,450 Celestial, infernal terrestrial sensations. The religious sentiment is painted in all the colours of the world. 42 00:05:04,450 --> 00:05:12,820 The divine figures are wrought by a free creative work, by a fantasy in which everything is permitted. 43 00:05:12,820 --> 00:05:18,940 So for Douleurs, what is really radical about this are in opposition to all those high renaissance. 44 00:05:18,940 --> 00:05:25,690 All the pieces that imagined the intercession of divinity as a volumetric perspective or 45 00:05:25,690 --> 00:05:32,440 physical component of the world is the renunciation of the claim to external reality. 46 00:05:32,440 --> 00:05:38,230 El Greco kind of, as a result of the intensely religious character in the society he's painted for, 47 00:05:38,230 --> 00:05:46,510 El Greco is content to distort the real because he knows at some level that the scenes he depicts can never be visualised. 48 00:05:46,510 --> 00:05:55,360 They are rather expressions of sentiment, religious sensations, religious paintings set out to bring the heavens down to earth, 49 00:05:55,360 --> 00:06:02,020 to rest, to rationalise the invisible, to embody it in volume and form with El Greco. 50 00:06:02,020 --> 00:06:08,980 It recognises this task to be impossible. Invisibility is elsewhere than in the painting. 51 00:06:08,980 --> 00:06:14,200 Now, the less his argument is typically woolly when it comes to historical accuracy, 52 00:06:14,200 --> 00:06:20,020 but it suggests an answer to a question who's always puzzled me about the art of psychology. 53 00:06:20,020 --> 00:06:22,480 That is why I paint. 54 00:06:22,480 --> 00:06:30,760 Why persist in the production of objects that are so evidently limited, for which limitation is built into the very fabric of their medium? 55 00:06:30,760 --> 00:06:40,630 When every fibre of your practise seems to strain in the opposite direction towards a broader perspective, one quote in dialogue with the universe. 56 00:06:40,630 --> 00:06:44,170 So we're all familiar with. After today, we definitely are. 57 00:06:44,170 --> 00:06:48,820 But we're familiar with the explosion events that predicts extraterrestrials, 58 00:06:48,820 --> 00:06:57,430 those massive expenditures of willpower and resource that imagine a radically non-human viewpoint looking down from above. 59 00:06:57,430 --> 00:07:04,540 We've all seen the Sky Ladder Sci explains the need for non-human viewers in transcendent terms. 60 00:07:04,540 --> 00:07:14,440 Only an alien could view an artwork from outside the admittedly the superhuman structures that condition the ordinary viewer gazing from the heavens. 61 00:07:14,440 --> 00:07:18,910 This alien would look beyond ideology, nationhood and the global market. 62 00:07:18,910 --> 00:07:24,310 There's uneasy partners in the play of contemporary art production. 63 00:07:24,310 --> 00:07:29,260 Painting offers no such escape. It is neither ephemeral nor universal. 64 00:07:29,260 --> 00:07:35,020 Two dimensional mounted to a wall, it demands an embodied human viewpoint. 65 00:07:35,020 --> 00:07:40,810 It deals with visibility, so recognises the limits this entails. 66 00:07:40,810 --> 00:07:49,510 At times, he can even sound as if his paintings are subsidiary mediations of either the small scale explosions that produced them, 67 00:07:49,510 --> 00:07:53,330 or of the larger explosion events to which they relate. 68 00:07:53,330 --> 00:08:02,620 Quote You can never recreate through painting the visceral experience of the Earth vibrating or the heat your body feels. 69 00:08:02,620 --> 00:08:12,610 But then other impressions from that instant give rise to the creative impulse to make paintings or drawings of the actual experience. 70 00:08:12,610 --> 00:08:20,800 Now, to recognise the limits of painting is not the same as to belittle the following the the recognition is often empowering 71 00:08:20,800 --> 00:08:27,580 when painting is liberated from the task of representing spirit when it recognises the limits of the visible. 72 00:08:27,580 --> 00:08:33,940 It requires a new freedom to further an ageing El Greco advances towards a reality. 73 00:08:33,940 --> 00:08:44,440 The more his paintings come to luxuriate in their own materiality and legwork, like the opening of the Fifth SEAL, is startling in its economy. 74 00:08:44,440 --> 00:08:49,300 There is no attempt to integrate the figures into a believable narrative sequence. 75 00:08:49,300 --> 00:08:53,140 The genuflecting st to the left is a giant. 76 00:08:53,140 --> 00:09:01,600 The other figures are diminutive, tortured mannequins, fragments of a large unity to which they do not add up. 77 00:09:01,600 --> 00:09:05,920 The coloured drapes which they hold press forwards, squeezing out atmosphere. 78 00:09:05,920 --> 00:09:12,450 Framing their naked forms in cloth in a manner that would not be seen again in European high art until the ad. 79 00:09:12,450 --> 00:09:17,850 And of modernism, three hundred years later, El Greco has reduced and refined his painting, 80 00:09:17,850 --> 00:09:27,060 liberated from the demands of accurate representation to the arrangement of coloured masses in flat space, which is what painting is. 81 00:09:27,060 --> 00:09:31,020 This brings us back to in search of El Greco number eight. 82 00:09:31,020 --> 00:09:38,880 If the controlled explosion of Valencia and gunpowder that created the painting was an event something temporal and transient, 83 00:09:38,880 --> 00:09:45,450 then the waves of blue paint that Coruscant across its paper surface of something more and something less than that. 84 00:09:45,450 --> 00:09:54,990 They are its imprint, its remnants. That beauty, like El Greco saying, works on two levels at the level of representation. 85 00:09:54,990 --> 00:10:04,710 Size forms have a strangely empty, mournful character. They refer to a reality, an event that is at least partially absent elsewhere. 86 00:10:04,710 --> 00:10:12,660 The explosion is in the past. It will never be made present just as El Greco as miraculous superhuman figures lose something. 87 00:10:12,660 --> 00:10:19,020 I think if we insist on imagining them as part of the real world, but painting cannot only work at this level. 88 00:10:19,020 --> 00:10:24,450 It insists on present is present and size forms like vast blue flowers, 89 00:10:24,450 --> 00:10:30,440 birds with wings outstretched returns to the beauty of the visible of what we can see. 90 00:10:30,440 --> 00:10:38,840 So, but I can offer some conclusions about this work of so-called Jones and the historical conversation attempt with El Greco. 91 00:10:38,840 --> 00:10:44,330 They have to do with the limits of representation of the taxonomic drive to record, classify, 92 00:10:44,330 --> 00:10:53,510 isolate and explain this all too often being the intellectual counterpart to Western societies history of expansion and domination. 93 00:10:53,510 --> 00:11:00,080 The lesson that in search of El Greco seems to take from this least typical of Christian painters, 94 00:11:00,080 --> 00:11:03,920 is that there are limits to human knowledge, to our representations. 95 00:11:03,920 --> 00:11:12,570 There are spheres of existence unknown to us that can never be made visible, and these limitations have a beauty all their own. 96 00:11:12,570 --> 00:11:21,962 Thank you.