A Selection of Geographies
Exploring the spaces of contemporary visual arts
Observe this painting for a second.
This is my favorite painting. It is a lesser-known Turner, probably incomplete, certainly not grandiose like its more famous siblings. When I met this work, in 2018, I had one of those tearing-up Stendhal syndrome moments. It was admittedly a little over the top.
I was obsessed with it because of the quotidian scene of a boy feeding shrimp to his little merry dog and because of the unfinished boat: a man-made, abandoned machine that left space for an empty nature.
There was a third thing, one that I understood only months later.
At first glance, the Evening Star is nowhere to be seen.
A diagonal extends between the boy in the foreground and the construction site in the background. The eye travels along the line. We stop and try to figure out what the white reflection on the water is, at the center of the diagonal.
That’s when we finally find the star.
Only visible by starting from its reflection, the Evening Star is found by tracing a vertical line going up from the white spot in the sea.
