CUTTING EDGE BRITISH ART AT THE PINK POLYGON

Three Great Paintings at the Pink Polygon

Congratulations to the curators of London’s flagship contemporary gallery for bringing us this magnificent exhibition of cutting edge art. Despite the controversially high entrance fee, the intellectual return you get when you see the works is quite amazing. Fortunately this has also cut down on the crowds of philistines one usually encounters when this kind of event is free — those masses of uninformed visitors who are so obviously out of their cultural and creative depth.
       On a recent trip to London I was one of the privileged few invited to a private viewing of the paintings on the Pink Polygon’s latest show. They are, without exception, masterworks of twenty-first century art.
       Unfortunately space and copyright restrictions allow me to show only three examples (If you haven’t yet noticed them, for goodness sake take a look at three masterpieces at the top of this page).
       Jack Delbos’s huge canvasses “evoke a fleeting glimpse of movement through the landscape, while also conveying their own vivid presence. The viewer is encouraged to enter into the emotional content of the work through thoughtful and open-minded observation.”       The other large colour field painting shown above is by the emerging Chinese artist Poubel. He describes his work thus: “The majority of my paintings are landscape inspired. I work from either my photographic records or from memory, applying layers of colour to express objects, movement and light. My method is very time consuming and it takes many months to complete a painting because of the multiple layers of oil paint applied to each work and the constant working back through the layers, resulting ultimately is a surface with few textural marks. Titles are also very important particularly when abstracting work; the title can be the only thing that links the artist to the viewer and my titles only hint at the subject matter of the painting, giving the viewer the freedom to come to their own understanding.”       The piece de resistance, however, in this magnificent show is Kopoor’s abstract masterpiece. Here’s how he’s described his own work: “The content is there in a way that’s more surprising than if I tried to make a content. So, therefore, the idea that subject matter is somehow not the same as content. Then, in a different sort of way, moving from matte surfaces to shiny surfaces. In terms of the fact that the traditional sublime is the matte surface, deep and absorbing, and that the shiny might be a modern sublime, which is fully reflective, absolutely present, and returns the gaze. This feels like a new way to think about the non-objective object.”

Oh well, I hope by now that everyone reading this post will have spotted that it’s all unadulterated crap. There’s no such place as the Pink Polygon — but sadly all of the artist’s comments are genuine. (The words have been taken, unedited, from commentaries living professional artists have provided about their own work.)       And, even more sadly, one of the photographs above is of a real work by one of these highly acclaimed artists — it’s worth thousands — well, perhaps “worth” is the wrong word, but it sold recently at Christies for 54,000 Pounds. The others are: a photograph of a fading poster taken in the village, and a painting by my two year old grandson.
FREE COMPETITION       The first person to post the correct answer to this question on this blog will win one of my original A4 size ink drawings of a village in this part of France. (All you have to do is say: Kapoor’s painting is number 1, 2 or 3) The drawing will be posted to the winner in a cardboard tube — if they want it that is.