Natale Labia
These last few months have done many things to us, to our psyches.
One of these deeply profound effects is how we have dealt with the built environment of our ‘homes’, and one aspect of our homes I would like to highlight in this piece – the relationship we have with our own art, with the things that colour our spaces.
We spend so much of our lives talking and thinking about art. How does it reflect society? What is trendy, who is in vogue? How can we deconstruct objects through discourse to the point of exhaustion, when all an object becomes is exactly that, an object of discourse? Perhaps an effect of this lockdown, of this crisis, is to cut through all of this pretence. No gallery openings to attend have probably had an effect…
Perhaps what I, maybe we, have been reminded these last few months is a quite simple, oft forgotten point. How do we feel about the things we live with?
‘About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’
As we have spent time these last few months, sitting and eating and looking out of the window, how have we related to these objects we deign to love?
For me it is about seeing things in a new light. Objects I thought I understood, which I accumulated over the years of travel and peripatetic lifestyle, with an idea in mind, potentially how that object fitted into an idea of an object – have been entirely reconsidered.
What have I learnt after these months?
Complexity in these objects can both be due to detail and intricacy, but can equally be about subtlety, fine execution, and purpose.
The medium is unimportant. Things that are good to live with can be anything, paint, print, photography. What is critical is the essence of what one feels the artist was trying to express, and how that makes one feel. It is impossible to gauge that momentarily, but over time it becomes self-evident.
There is nothing more personal than one’s own past, and those pieces which evoke our personal histories speak to parts of consciousness which one would never normally encounter. These are the pieces which persist, and which continue to fascinate.
The beauty is that after these months, we have all forged new relationships with these objects, which now represent even more than they might have before.
We should seek pieces of art which explain our own context better than we ever could. Maybe that, as much as anything, is the point of art. To be our companion, to make sense of all this, this seemingly futile undertaking of life.
Editor:
From Cape Town, South Africa. Former investment banker with a passion for all great art, but especially contemporary African and photography.
Bocconi Art Newspaper 