THE MATTER OF PAINTING
Ariane Koek
International Arts Science Technology Ecology Strategic Cultural Consultant, Producer, Writer and Creative Director FRSA
Claude Monet is one of the greatest painters of light and the passing of time. The largest collection of his paintings in the world is housed at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.
On Monday October 22nd, the second in their new series called Unexpected Dialogues opens. Each year, the museum commissions a leading international artist to respond to works in the collection. This year it is the Turner prize winning artist Keith Tyson - known for his interrogations of the nature of reality using different materials.
One of the many things I love doing, is being invited to write about artists and their work and witness the creative process in action. I had the great pleasure of interviewing Keith whilst he was making the works in response to Monet and to talk to him about the process. Like all Keith's work, he draws on a wide range of thinking from the sciences, including physics, philosophy and literature to make his work. In fact I first met him when I was doing the feasibility study in 2009 for the Arts at Cern programme. His approach to physics and the sciences as an artist heavily influenced my approach to the programme which I initiated and directed for 5 years. See here my original manifesto for Arts at Cern written for The Arts Newspaper in 2011 which acknowledges Keith's contribution to my thinking for Arts at Cern. https://medium.com/@luclalande/arts-and-science-are-similar-in-that-they-are-expressions-of-what-it-is-to-be-human-in-this-world-b5624a2ffe2a
My latest interview with Keith is published in the catalogue of the Tyson/Monet exhibition and it reveals many things, including his thoughts about arts and science, and the process behind the paintings he has made in response to Monet's. There are some surprises - you have been warned.
What became very clear when watching Keith at work and interviewing him is that in the 4 very diverse paintings he has made, time is as much the material of his painting as the materiality of the paint itself. This was the same for Monet - who used to place canvases around the room to represent different hours, paint on them at different times of day and rotate their order - hence the granularity of light he achieved on canvas. And hence the title of the exhibition - The Matter of Painting - inviting the viewer to reflect on time as the invisible matter used in both these artists's work as both the subject and its material.