1987 : Reflections After Las Meninas, Royal Academy of Arts

FOREWORD
We are delighted that this exhibition is to open in the Royal Academy Diploma Galleries. It is the third in the series of occasional exhibitions at the Royal Academy of the work of individual artists representing a single project in multiple media for a specified interior or for a space unrealizable except in a public gallery. The first, Eduardo Paolozzi's designs for Tottenham Court Road underground station was shown by multiple projection and original designs; the second, Michael Kenny's sculpted environment included stone and wood floor pieces, together with painted wall sculpture and related drawings.

Anthony Whishaw's preoccupation with Velazquez's 'Las Meninas' is represented by a series of large paintings executed over a span of three/four years, together with drawings and other material showing the genesis, variations on the central idea, and their later evolution. He is a painter, who from his earliest years as a new realist and the subsequent development of a less direct or oblique stance, has been obsessed by the drama of presentation either by the mise-en-scène or by the effects of light and dark. It is no surprise then that the characters of Las Meninas appear to dissolve as they move on the stage from leading role to diminishing off-stage presence, finally giving way to the ambiguous reflection mirrored for the spectator in indeterminate splendour of the setting. For the visitor, it is a rewarding voyage from familiar images to unexpected conclusions.

We are grateful to Stephen Foster of the John Hansard Gallery for organising the tour of the exhibition.

Roger de Grey,President, Royal Academy of Arts

INTRODUCTION
Anthony Whishaw has always kept himself free from all alliances, 'schools' and 'isms'. Rather, his continual self-questioning produces painting which is always in transition.
For Whishaw, a painting practice run on principles which subscribe to the values of modernity has to try to keep open the possibility of surprising, of confounding, the painter himself. For an artist to commit himself to such a practice is necessarily hazardous. His 'identity' is always at risk, and he is continually involved in asking, even during the very process of creating, whether yesterday's solutions are adequate to meet today's contingencies and feelings. Whishaw's self-transformations testify to the depth of his involvement with the question of what it is to be a modern painter.

The challenge of his paintings, with their ability to engage and hold us on their own terms, is closely bound up with his own intimate relation to the tradition of painting (a tradition which now has to include modern painting). His oeuvre reminds us that, for him, painting has never been a simple movement of advance. Rather, his work reveals his conviction that painting is always in the middle of a complex dialogue with its own past; the possibility of painting moving us, of transporting us to another place, of making us ecstatic, lies in the ways it reveals its struggles with and indebtedness to what it has already achieved. The recurring theme of such a dialogue is to be found specifically in Whishaw's desire continually to re-invent the means for representing his changing relationship to landscape or, rather, to place.

However, Whishaw is no 'landscape painter' in the usual sense of the term, for a feature of his practice has been ceaselessly to subvert those conventional wisdoms which constitute the category of 'landscape painting'. He has always recognised that, to explore the ways paint may represent anything, entangles the painter in a complex web of questions about the of painting itself. For the self-questioning painter, whatever the explicit subject matter, the first and last questions are always about the place of painting itself, about what painting can do. For Whishaw the 'telos' of his practice has been to find ways of preserving each work as an open site upon which the processes of representation can be explored and celebrated; his works are thus not paintings of particular landscapes but painting-as-landscape - sites of permanent excavation.

It is this wider meaning of landscape which informs Whishaw's approach to Las Meninas. He has recognised that this painting by Velazquez constituted an enigmatic and provocative place into which he was inexorably drawn. If his art has been continuously driven by his need to create metaphors for his relation to place, then he realised that Las Meninas was a, or perhaps the, locus where the crucial paradoxes of painting-as-representation occurred. It confirmed his own central conviction that a painting must establish itself as the location within which the mundane certainties about our relation to place are made to tremble.

In Las Meninas, Velazquez appears to render wholly equivocal the issue of representation itself. He entices the viewer into a painting fraught with ambiguities and, in the best modern tradition, makes the journey into the work one in which all traditional pictorial certainties are eliminated.

It is this region of uncertainty which is inhabited by modern painting and to which Whishaw has himself been drawn. His multiple responses to its complex layers of meaning reveal that, while undeniably an 'interior' painting, the interior of Las Meninas is anything but a single enclosed space. For Whishaw it opens onto that which is unfathomable, that which is finally without boundary. It is, perhaps, this discovery which has enabled him in his Las Meninas paintings to dissolve the boundaries between interior and exterior. These works reveal, in very different ways, that the space which painting inhabits is a measureless region, neither inside nor outside, in which everything (every implied depth, recession, movement, figure, colour, light, shade) is dependent upon nothing but the 'life' of the paint on the surface.

During the course of his work around Las Meninas, Whishaw has created paintings whose surfaces have undoubtedly become much richer and more daring. However, at the same time, their complexity and seductiveness are in tension with the figurative elements whose very possibility they sustain. Well aware of this essential tension, Whishaw treats his surfaces as places for continuous experiment.

The ways in which Whishaw creates these places violates our conventional expectations of form, of the canvas-as-space, of materials, and of the original subject, Las Meninas. This violence appears to be bound up with Whishaw's reflections on and feelings about the darker aspects of Spanish culture which permeate all his Las Meninas works. These are present in the early "Matadero Municipal" with the bull's skull in the painting's left-hand panel, and indirectly in his constant recourse to combinations of sombre blacks, greys, browns and reds (as in the brooding scarred outer panels hemming in the figures in the triptych Margarita, Maria Bárbola and Dog). Yet the playful, ironic violence done to the young princess in "Punk Infanta" reveals another side of Whishaw which is also found in the "Gilt Mirror". In this latter work, Whishaw responds to Velazquez's play with mirroring by dissolving the mirror's edges and making the gilt frame invade and entwine the reflections in a riot of sprawling lines and splotches.

There is, perhaps, an additional type of violence present in the forcible painterly separation of his figures. Drawn from and alluding to specific figures in Las Meninas, the figures in these paintings almost always occupy separate spaces, thus sundering the specific relations of authority, status, subservience and dependence implied in Velazquez's work. This separation is especially clear in the large blue painting "Maria Bárbola and Figure" with its unequivocal vertical divisions.

The fact that each painting is constructed as a place in multiple spaces are juxtaposed and interwoven disturbs and defers the viewer's ability to see it as a simple 'whole'. In addition, given the extraordinary length of some of the paintings, there is no correct position from which it is to be viewed. They challenge the viewer to return again and again to find ways back into that infinitely narrow gap between surface mark and figuration, the gap where painting takes place.

The works thus invite from the viewer what they took from the artist - an extended contemplation through the interplay of memory, reverie and feeling. To engage them on their own terms requires a journey, a tracking back and forth, involving continuous revisions and displacements. And this process of contemplation begins to reveal the qualities of Whishaw's relationship to Las Meninas, and its importance as a point both of departure and return for him. For if it is a painting that takes us to the heart of the enigmas of painting-as-representation, the only point of returning to it for a committed modern painter would be to confront one's own painting with those same enigmas, enigmas of reflection and illusion, of the relation between the painter and the subject, of the painter's place.

It is for this reason that this group of works cannot be approached as a series through which one might trace the artist's progressive development of a theme or motif; the radical differences between his works, for example, "Punk Infanta", "Reflections I" and "Gilt Mirror", show that the reason for his engagement with Las Meninas is because it confronts the question of the identity, the place, of painting itself. To approach that place where we are still within representation but suspended between mark and meaning, signifier and signified, is the point of Whishaw's project.

His working procedures reveal his concern to come upon the place of painting from somewhere new. All his paintings are products of years of work. Each is the consummation of many return journeys of addition and subtraction. He is content to play the waiting game until exactly the right play of moods and keys is registered and the relations between the multiplicity of surface events feel 'right'. It takes him years to bring these events into a precarious tension which he can accept. Yet the result is a painting that will never settle down, that will always defer the possibility of a single reading.


In following Whishaw's journey around Las Meninas we discover an artist who, on his own terms, is continually confronting questions of modern painting. Set beside those sad obituaries for the modern movement, Whishaw's paintings inscribe the vital necessity of modern art's self-renewal. He is well aware that the terms of this renewal may be changing and that a re-thinking of the artist's relation to tradition is central to any such change. Knowing that the modern painter is condemned to live eternally between tradition and innovation, remembering and forgetting, love and irony, pleasure and pain, culture and anarchy, Whishaw creates works which seek to make manifest the virtues of painting's ability to synthesise such apparent contradictions.

Michael Phillipson