ALFRED KREN

Writings about art:

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Stations: Munich - Paris - New York - Cologne - Austin - Brussels - London (work in progress)

review of James Ensor at the Royal Academy, London, 29 Oct 2016 through 29 Feb 2017 on LinkedIn by Alfred Kren

29 October 2016 - 29 February 2017

On January 3 I finally made it to the Luc Tuymans-curated show of James Ensor at the Royal Academy, just one day after reading obituaries on John Berger.

In retrospect I see astonishing parallels: the artist from a privileged bourgeois background, lashing out at the bourgeois that he so fully understands. This "agent provocateur" role of the insider, who also happens to be an outsider, could also apply to Luc Tuymans, according to Sam Phillips, editor of the RA magazine.

To return to this surprisingly intimate, yet fully comprehensive exhibition, that sensitively mixes in works by Léon Spillaert plus Luc Tuymans' "Gilles de Binche" from 2004 together with the unknown artist's "Ostrich feather headdress worn by Gilles de Binche on the afternoon of Shrove Wednesday" from 2000, I cannot state with more emphasis the graceful installation which allows the works to breathe and to be experienced as an ensemble. One of my all-time favourite Ensor paintings "The Skate" from 1892 is installed in such a way that you can see it from afar, isolated and alluring from distance, yet tantalisingly entangled and weirdly spatial up close. The key here are the sheer endless undulations of texture that unfold within each object, leaving a tingling sensation of tissues up close, whilst being held against a background that itself seems to tingle - from the busy corners of the void, from light being thrown into corners of the invisible. There is a certain frenzy in these surfaces that mirror the rich tapestries of the bourgeois interiors with all their layers of fabric, patterned china, furs, Japanese prints and other art on their walls, down to the gowns, the hats and the veils hiding women’s faces. Good examples are Ensor's paintings "The Artist's Studio" from around 1930 in the collection of the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam and "The Favourite Room" from 1892 in the collection of the Tel Avic Museum (not exhibited), both of which can on the one hand be cerebrally "read" with all their "quotations" and on the other hand be sensually traversed like a perfumed pile of fabrics. In the "Skate" painting there are stunningly free passages, where a complete decomposition of matter takes place. They emphasise even more the process of coming into being and fading away.

The cascading opulence of all these textures finds its counterpart in the masks that represent on the one hand the utmost crescendo of this textural race and on the other hand, in their tiltedness, mark the absurdity of all these efforts. It is like a corpse with mirror. (Interestingly enough Ensor approached something like a pure vision in colour and abstraction with his early painting "Calm Sea" from 1881 that feels astonishingly close to Jean Fautrier's thickly impastoed abstractions of the 1950s. In the copperplate etching "The Stars in the Cemetery" from 1888 he is close to the stripped purity of Jean Dubuffet's "Textural Transcriptions", also of the 1950s).

Like in Bunuel’s film "The Exterminating Angel" none of these creatures can leave the room they are locked in. And so their otherworldly reflections grimace in the form of masks or skeletons. It is with grim determination that Ensor himself takes on that role, as is beautifully demonstrated by such works as "The Skeleton Painter", 1896 and "My Portrait as a Skeleton", joining the "Skeleton Looking at Chinoiseries", 1888-90.

Ensor’s work is relevant to our time, because he not only de-masked bourgeois appearances, where vices and excesses lurk beneath facades, making room for laughter and trepidation, but also revelled in the pleasures and adventures of painting, stripping it down and dressing it up. There is an obsessiveness in Ensor that is both corporeal and spiritual. In his drawings he sometimes comes close to Odilon Redon, as in "Revelatory Heart" from 1884. For Ensor the fantastic was embedded in the domestic.

His depictions of flesh deliver the full range of the most delicate pinks all the way down to the most rotten red tones that hover above black, above the abyss.

As Emile Verhaeren writes, "If for James Ensor some furniture is haunted, all objects shiver, move, feel. Cruelty resides in the knife, discretion in the key and in the chisel, repose and security in wood. Nothing is dead, completely. Each material contains in itself its tendency, its will, its spirit. It is created for an end. It ought then to have a tenderness as a soul in the end and it is precisely this soul which alone interests us in the inanimate and which alone constitutes, in the eye of the artist, the beauty of things, the move unknown. " (in "Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor, The Drawing Center, New York, 2001).