Wind-eyes
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I had thought of calling this short note on David Risley’s paintings ‘think twice,’ because that is what they make me do. I think of them first as illusions then again as objects, or the other way round and sometimes both at once. That is because they flirt with the illusionism of the Albertian window: the picture plane conceived of as the intersection of the cone of vision that widens from the eye of the spectator onto the represented scene. But they are also given the trompe l’oeil quality of being real windows that fool you as holes in the wall do because they are the same size as windows and stand at the right height from the gallery floor. That’s not right either, because they were originally upper windows photographed at an angle from below but then straightened up from a parallelogram into a rectangle by phone editing so that they confront us head-on at eye-height. This distorts all the vectors of the roof lines to form a hybrid of mechanical and mystical effects as if dry, isometric, drawing had been combined with the Sienese perspective of Gothic works. Take, for example, the line where wall meets ceiling in Jacket. It creates the weird effect of a yellow guillotine blade decapitating the glowing orb of the light bowl from the jacket’s empty body.
Of the twenty works on show, thirteen are windows, but unlike the scores of images shown at the Met in the exhibition Rooms with a View: the Open Window in the 19th Century a few years ago, they do not look onto an outer world, but into domestic interiors seen from the street. ‘The window paintings are based on photographs I take of windows at night in Copenhagen. Most of them are painted almost exactly as I found them. Many Copenhagen apartment windows have a cross structure, they’re called Danebro windows, after the Danish flag. People rarely use blinds or curtains; they are often left bare with soft lighting and a house plant on the windowsill… I treat them as found paintings.’ The phrase ‘Found paintings’ is the clue that these works oppose perspectival realism by turning paintings back into miraculous objects that conjure up alternative worlds. As Duchamp said of the freestanding sculpture of a French window with a teale-coloured frame and black, leather-lined glass panes he called ‘Fresh Widow’ (1920): ‘the idea was ‘(always) to make something that can’t be called a picture (in this case ‘make windows’)’ – a not so subtle sweep at Leon Battista Alberti’s famous metaphor of painting as a window onto the world. Originally these voyeuristic photographs captured the alienation of the artist as an Englishman in Copenhagen, attending to visions of ‘hygge,’ warmth of Danish fellowship denied to a stranger. But in positioning the gallery viewer alongside the artist as an outsider, the trappings of a conventional Danish interior - the cut-out hands or stars fixed on glass, the vegetal patterns of a blind, the houseplants, the stereotypical reproduction of a Hammershøi painting hung on a wall – are detached from the owner and appropriated by voyeurs to inform their private world of associations. Hence my title ‘Wind-eyes’. Before glass fenestration, the Old Norse word for window was ‘wind-eye,’ since windows were for ventilation rather than looking through. Likewise, these painting elicit an imaginative wind from us that shoots streams of fantasy through the perspectival window plane. As objects they readmit the miraculous that Risley believes Renaissance perspective supressed from Gothic artifacts.
This chronological prejudice is somewhat betrayed in Egg Raid on Perrycroft by the suspended egg that has escaped from the exquisite perspective of della Francesca’s early Renaissance Brera Madonna in Milan. The title alludes to a childhood prank when he seen throwing an egg at the window of house in the posher part of town and had to clear up the mess if his father wasn’t told. The Necker’s cube window frames swing inwards as well as outwards like the leaves of an altarpiece in a space where rules are suspended. In the context of the transcendental imagination,[1] these windows bear the traces of an early sin redeemed by the cold fertility of Piero’s mysteriously suspended orb, the cosmic egg and origin of all we become, above the mess of ‘egg tempera’ painted then scraped away in penance.
Thus, in this (mainly) pre-perspectival, neo-medieval world, back stories from the artist’s English childhood are surreally and anachronistically entangled with the Early Modern iconography of Christian legends. In St Stephen of Tamworth a rock from his parents’ rockery thrown by a member of a gang in the street is frozen in mid-flight with its reflection looming upon the artificial leaded panes of his parents’ privatised council house it is about to smash. St Stephen, we remember, was stoned to death for rebuking those who crucified Christ, while the artist’s native Tamworth in Staffordshire was host to many secular institutions called Saint this or that. Thus do the archaic and the contemporary, the miraculous and the banal, the object and the illusion rub shoulders – while in further defiance of perspective science the rock travels in front of the picture plane rather than within it. (The same is true of the outstretched hand of Cleopas in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaeus.) All permutations are deployed: we see through, in front of, behind, inside, outside, reflections and surface effects on the picture plane. We also see before and after its intact presence.
Admitting the miraculous, the hand of God is seen everywhere in the show: in the raised silver arm housing the bone of an unknown saint whose sacredness is actualized (like the meaning of art works) only by the faith of believers; in the arthritic, outstretched arm of Jacob, fringed by golden light, in an act of creation whose fingers might only be making trivial flicking gesture; in the hand cupping a conker beside sunbeams emanating from a ‘70s style lamp in a Danish window, where Julian of Norwich (as the title suggests), translated to Vesterbro (a Copenhagen suburb), considers that the nut-sized object that he holds is – somewhat like the suspended orb in Egg Raid on Perrycroft - everything that ever was, is or will be, and might suddenly disappear: ‘“It is all that is made.” I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed to me it might suddenly have fallen into nought [nothing] for its littleness.’
But the hand of the artist everywhere desacralizes the hand of God by ensuring our awareness of artifice. The stars reflected in a darkened window might just be paint splatter, enigmatic blackout on windowpanes doubles as sloppy brushstrokes. The very theme of windows is inherently reflexive, since windows and paintings always remind us of each other, especially in Strandgade, where a view through a window reveals an interior on whose wall is shown a print of Hammershøi’s Strandgade, depicting another interior whose window looks outward to admit shafts of natural daylight that illuminate the floor and clashes with that other archetypal cliché of Danishness, the PH light, that illuminates in turn the window frame. It is a mise-en-abyme that sets interiors against exteriors and night against day in several levels of retreat from ‘reality,’ like photocopies of photocopies.
What then of the portraits? Their eyes, too, are windows to the soul, especially those of Alexandra Genova’s portrait, sliding sideways with enigmatic suspiciousness. As the size of paperbacks, the portraits are like modern icons. Depicting personal friends, they are testaments of youthful beauty caught in hieratic profile or turned beneath flaxen hair, endowed with careless grace and charistmatic presence like sport stars or TikTok celebrities.
The ocular transfiguration of the inanimate culminates in Eye, depicting an eighteenth-century model of an eye used for teaching purposes. Yet it resembles Reliquary in its silvery decorative intricacy and the aura it emanates in the wash behind. It reminds the artist of the hand of God and of CCTV imagery used to warn off burglars. Its animated, sacerdotal, hawk-eyed vigilance (see also Hawk), looks back at our looking. It is in this solipsistic state that titles like ‘blind’ and ‘blinded’ apply as much to the condition of the spectator-artist as to the subject matter. Like the reverse canvas in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, blinds illustrate the Lacanian commonplace of painting not just as something to be looked at, but as something looking at you and sending back to you your own unconsummated desire, revised as nothing but vanity.[2] The prismatic fire that flickers between the slats in the variegated hues of blinded is not just from the electric light behind. It also manifests the battering force of our desires and longings for everything we cannot have on the other side of windows.
Eye’s triumph of spectacle over function consorts with the sentiment of the exhibition title ‘Of Clocks and Clouds’ in a show in which there are neither clocks nor barely any clouds. The reference is to the title of an essay by Karl Popper that favours methodologies that explicate complex, indeterminate phenomena rather than fixed mechanical processes. The fine precision of the works in this show serves the purpose of spontaneously discovering the quirkily indeterminate within the boring, the literal and the obvious. In Georg Simmel’s understanding of the term in Das Abenteuer (1911), it is an exhibition of secular adventures procuring Christological accidents from commonplace materials and experiences. It endorses the postmodernist co-existence and mutual deconstruction of pragmatic, representational, symbolic and abstract styles within the same painting. If – as Terry Eagleton somewhere claimed - all aesthetic problems begin as theological ones, then the counterclaims of idolatry and iconoclasm rapidly alternate in these works, like swiftly blinking wind-eyes.
Richard Read
Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Art History, The University of Western Australia.
[1] Judith Wolfe, The Transcendental Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art and Faith (Cambride: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
[2] Aaron Schuster, ‘The Lacan-Foucault Relation: Las Meninas, Sexuality, and the Unconscious.’Lecture at the Lacan Contra Courtauld conference, American University of Beirut, December 4, 2015, p. 13.