#10 'Nothing's really happened like I thought it would'
Drawing Notre Dame, photographing typologies -- and the delicious signs that autumn is settling in.
Yesterday late afternoon I interviewed an artist called Axelle Ponsonnet on Zoom, me in London, she in Paris. For the past four years, she has been documenting the restoration of Notre Dame in drawing and etching.
I got so engrossed in what she was telling me, I didn’t realise the sun was setting until I actually saw the chiaroscuro of what she was seeing of me, a ghost listener in pixellated shadow.
It’s fitting really. Axelle had been telling me about how she started drawing on her own time, after most other people’s day had ended and the cathedral, still in ruins, was quiet. This was 2020, just a year after it had burned. She was hired as an architect to work with the team restoring the roof structure. Experts weren’t sure more of it wouldn’t still collapse.
I’d woken up painting in my mind. After two weeks of so much art, my phone and my brain both are at maximum capacity. I can’t sleep for all the stuff churning around in it, so much of it exciting and exhilarating and demanding and inspiring, a lot of it terrible too. The kind of bounty that makes you want to make work, whether to beat away the mess or meet the challenge (clear the bar) that the good stuff has set.
But between the dream and that interview, I spent the day forcing myself to first go for a run (😬, I’ve signed up to do next year’s Hackney Half, God actually help me**) then meet a deadline on something entirely unrelated (Charlotte Gainsbourg’s current travails at keeping la Maison Gainsbourg, her father’s house and museum, open to the public*). I’ve also been listening to some beautiful new tunes (from Bon Iver***, Eli Winter, Robert Glasper, Lots of Hands, Blue Lake and more — Spotify playlist below) and some solid-gold old ones (TLC, Teedra Moses, the Roots, Mos Def, Dilla always Dilla) and I feel like I’ve finally come back to myself.
So, I’m going to leave you with a few lists.
First, some work from the last weeks that I can’t stop thinking about (pics below correspond to list numbers, counting from left to right, top to bottom; copyright for the works belongs to the artists):
Nigerian painter Ayogu Kingsley
Malagasy artist Joel Andrianomearizoa’s Falling Angels (on back wall) and Algerian conceptual artist Faycal Baghriche’s La Réserve, 2024, (2 - foreground — they’re African Mask display stands).
Romeo Mivekannin’s entire oeuvre (the painting on the wall; the sculpture in the foreground is by Zimbabwean sculptor Terrence Musekiwa.)
Frank Auerbach’s heads (Julia Asleep, 2001) and Yuichi Inoue’s frozen ink on paper (see Un, above, the main pic).
Nobuya Hoki’s mesmerising blurs at Taka Ishii Gallery’s Frieze booth (from a series of which Hoki has explained stems from “intermingling figure and ground”: “The goal is to establish a symbiotic and holistic relationship between a flawed figure and a flawed ground.”).
Adegboyega Adesina’s painting, especially Self-reflection, 2023
Isis Dove-Edwin’s ceramic pieces — here, Drift, 2024
Leiko Ikemura’s Double Figure, 2024 (the whole show at Lisson Gallery’s booth at Frieze was wonderful)
Kira Freije’s sculptures (Love Beyond, 2024)
Also, four pics showing details of Esther Mahlangu’s work in London — the Ndebele artist born in 1935, has been translating her nation’s traditions into contemporary spaces for seven decades and I am on the hunt for scholarly art historical deep dives into the extraordinary work she’s still making. Any bibliographical suggestions, please hit me up.
Also, also, some pieces I would buy in a heartbeat if I could:
At Minor Attractions (the most confusing fair, without which, the massive buzz notwithstanding, I can defo live — walking around it in the hectic gloom felt like a headache), there was one of Chiara Camoni’s beautiful wall necklaces from her Grande Sorella series .
Nádia Taquary’s magnificent Oriki sculpture series exploring Afro-Brazilian sacred traditions and practices.
Barbara Levittoux-Świderska’s Millipede (Stonoga) from 1974, made of sisal and tree branches.
Doris Salcedo’s Disremembered XI, 2021 (sewing needles and silk thread).
Maiko Tatsumi’s A Field, 2024
And, like last year, I just got stuck with Emmanuel Botalatala’s incredible bas-relief pieces: Le Dernier Jugement and Motards à Pied
Then a list of lists.
Ever since Hilla and Bernd Becher started photographing water towers in the late 1950s, artists have used photography to document groups of things, or what art historians term typologies. And it doesn’t matter how often this has been done, every series will reliably capture my attention. I love them. Here are a few new and old ones I’m particularly taken by:
Haegue Yang’s Korean sitting tables (on view in her big show at the Hayward Gallery, amid the giant bell and venetian blind installations (more of which another time).
Ashfika Rahman’s Bangladeshi TVs, in a series titled The Power Box.
French-Japanese-Danish duo Eric Tabuchi and Nelly Monnier’s ongoing Atlas des Régions Naturelles, which is a series of series, a meta-typology that I wrote about a while back and am never not thinking about. The latest volume, #6, is just out.
Lisa Lev Ross’s many projects documenting Uyghur objects, traditions and places: especially the shrines and the beds in the desert (because it’s hot). Again, an extraordinary body of work that too few have paid attention to. Ross is very very ill right now, which is properly heartbreaking.
It’s a wet autumn in London. My trainers are covered in yellow leaves and my favourite tree on Amhurst Road is reddening from the top down. Here’s a Katie Paterson sentence that feels perfect, somehow, for this Thursday afternoon:
The scent
of rain
left on the moon.
Notes
*Watch this interview Charlotte gave in 2023 when the house finally opened to the public. She’d kept it untouched and hardly seen for 32 years, since his death in 1991. My piece on all of this will be in next month’s issue of the Art Newspaper.
**Might need your moral support/sponsorship, if either appeals in any way — hit me up if so <3
***Today’s title is a lyric from Justin Vernon’s latest foray into our listening, a pre-release track called Speyside, from his EP, Sable, which comes out tomorrow. “Nothing’s really something now the whole thing’s soot,” he sings. I never really know what he’s talking about. My kid would say that he probably doesn’t either. But he builds whole unknowable worlds with those nothings and they mean the world to me. There aren’t many other artists I have listened to as religiously as this man.
Pull up a memory
I’m still obsessed with how teenagers, or #gentleminions as they took to calling themselves, went to see Minions: The Rise of Gru in 2022, wearing suits. It was a sequel to a film that had come out 7 years earlier, when they were at primary school, so of course they wanted to see it. Avery reminded me of this this week, with this awesome clip: “Skip to around 10:30 of this video,” she said, “—reminds me of your minions boys ❤️ the kids are alright!”. She’s right!
World of echo
Walking as a state of mind
Really loving this Substack by
, titled Super Ordinary Life. Her latest post is a good instructable: “Take the long way, the slow way. If you can, go alone with your eyes WIDE open. Make time for it—no rushing. Keep your phone in your pocket, and promise yourself you’ll only reach for it when something stirs you: a burst of colour, an alluring texture, a slice of light or an inexplicably satisfying something that just holds you still for a few moments. Let time stretch. Let your eyes wander. Let yourself feel that old, untamed wonder you knew as a kid—the one that “grown-up” shucked you out of. Let’s reclaim that capacity for awe. Let’s stroll…”
Thanks for these gifts, Dale. I would love to see more of Axelle Ponsonnet's work.