I spent another fun afternoon yesterday at Bermondsey’s White Cube gallery. It’s quite fun to walk around with a friend and try to figure out, with the help of the exhibition guide, what on earth modern art is all about. Still no clue.

Jurgen Partenheimer

First we saw some Jurgen Partenheimer paintings. They are very abstract (they do not represent things). They often look quite ‘provisional’, with pencil lines on blank paper, lines that had quite obviously been painted over, and previously-applied layers of paint peeking out at the side of the canvas. They didn’t always look polished, and sometimes they looked unfinished. So far we were correctly grasping the ‘open-ended quality’ and the ‘potential to dissolve and reform at any moment’ the blurb spoke of.

Mimesis

El Color del Canto

Sometimes the abstract forms looked quite pretty on their own. I enjoyed the striking orange, lilac and yellow colour palette: crocus-like! Sometimes they evoked things I’m sure are totally irrelevant to interpreting the works, like the above ‘aerial map’ of a city with streets and parks.

Sometimes they were neither pretty nor evocative, but seemed merely random shapes and blocks of colour thrown onto a board in 10 minutes. Randomness isn’t always incomprehensible: sometimes it can contribute to a greater whole that, in the ensemble, is pretty or striking or interesting. But many of these paintings were not in that mould. Why?!

Larry Bell

The Larry Bell exhibition was a little more engaging, less because we knew what the works were supposed to mean, more because the materials and how they interacted with the light created some interesting effects.

Firstly, his ‘paintings’ are created by spraying aluminium and quartz onto paper, resulting in a sheeny, not quite reflective but almost light-emitting, surface, sometimes with colours that change as you move around (the photos don’t do them justice).

Secondly, we saw An Improvisation, an installation made up of 6 x 6 panels of glass arranged in squares, some tinted, some clear and some half-reflective.

It means that you can walk beside the panel and watch as your ‘real’ legs turn into ghost legs as the panel switches from reflective to clear glass: