Hung like a horse
In my exhibition of 2012 “Shame: How to hang your head” I wanted to play around with the idea of the line between what is a painting and what is a sculpture, and particularly the way that a painting might be framed and hung. So I was intrigued by the Facebook invitation I got to see Gabriel Schmitz “Sense Fi” at Galeria Jordi Barnadas. For here was a photo of the paintings on the floor, tantalisingly wrapped in bubbles and waiting to be readied for the exhibition. The next evening. Exactly. The next evening. OK, it’s only twenty or so paintings, and the gallery has some really useful, but hideously ugly, metal rails running across the whole wall, and from floor to ceiling about a foot apart. So it wasn’t going to take long to hang these paintings.
I was tantalised by the subject matter I could see through the bubble wrap. Figurative paintings. Great, I thought, something to get my teeth into. Something to make me look, and think and look again. Something to make me observe more than I might an abstract picture. I had only one gallery to visit this week, and I would spend a pleasant hour or so, drinking a couple of glasses of cava while taking a good look at the art.
As I walked in the door, I was not disappointed. I could see that I was in for a treat. There really was cava. In glasses made of glass. So many trendy galleries these days are just handing out the sponsored beers. But an opening without cava. Well.
The next thing I saw was all the people. There was a bit of a crush because it was the gallerist’s birthday, and they’d all come for cake. But it was hard to see the actual paintings. They were quite large enough, don’t get me wrong, but they were rather too low. Later on in the evening, when the majority of the crowd had wandered off in search of trendy tapas at one of the new restaurants along the street, and the four year old girl, Alicia, had space to run about, throwing the exhibition brochure around the room, it became clear that the paintings were even low enough for her to bump in to.
I just hope she wasn’t wearing a new dress. Because I didn’t want the wet paint to rub off on her. At this point I need to make it absolutely clear that Schmitz’ draughtsmanship is phenomenal. The charcoal drawings were stunning. “Al pie de la escalera” is a haunting, plaintive drawing of a woman at the bottom of the stairs. I could happily look at her, looking at me, without end, “sense fi”. The palette he uses across the majority of the paintings is sublime, with greys, blues and muted browns that truly give a sense of longing. His style, with expanses of raw canvas showing through, gives a tremendous sense of the incompleteness of the work, and of life.
I really wanted to like these paintings. To love them. And I almost could. But while contemplating them for an hour or so, something was niggling me. And then it dawned on me. It was a question of time. If Schmitz hadn’t put the drawings in this show, I might never have realised, and I would have left with just an eerie sense that something was not quite right. But the drawings had dates. And they were dated in the summer of 2014.
These oil paintings are nothing of the sort. They are acrylic paintings, gone wrong. Yes, they are oil on canvas. But not in any traditional sense of those words. And although I’m no traditionalist, there is little discernable drawing, groundwork, layering and scrubbing and painting again. The paint is daubed on, wet on wet. Working like this is perfectly acceptable if you have the sure footedness of a mountain goat. But you have to get the right splodge in the right place. Here there are bumps and nobbles in odd places on faces. Hands are often uncomfortably too big. The details are sometimes rather flat. The composition of most of the paintings is not quite there either, and the eponymous horse of this writing is almost hanging off the canvas. There is a drip of black paint coming from a hoof, and not in an artistic way. In the charcoal sketch “La China” the woman is looking down at me, wonderfully defiant and haughty. Her twin in oil, “Blanca sobre blanco” just stares at me insipidly.
And all this comes down to time. Time to draw and draw and draw. And honestly, those drawings would be amazing. But then time to build up on the canvas, day after day, week after week, month after month. Allowing each glint of light its space to shine, each eye to twinkle, each soul to radiate.
So, how to hang a horse? Well, for Alicia’s sake, maybe a little higher. Though given the extra year Schmitz needed to give himself on this show, maybe she’d have matured enough to enjoy looking at what should have been some truly wonderful paintings.
