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拍品專文
Patrick Caulfield's Sun Lounge is a key example of a group of mid-1970s paintings on architectural subjects that constitutes one of the high points of his consistently impressive output over a period of 45 years. Given his always slow and measured rate of production, it is striking that in a period of just two years he produced this and five more of his largest, most spatially complex and visually arresting canvases including Paradise Bar (Virignia Museum of Fine Arts) and Springtime: Face a la Mer of 1974, and Forecourt, Entrance and After Lunch (Tate, London) of 1975. For these ambitious paintings, as for the interiors that preceded them, Caulfield first made detailed pencil drawings that were squared up and transferred to canvas with felt-tip pens on the reverse of polythene sheets. Several of the new sequence of pictures still conformed to the essentially monochromatic palette that he had favoured in the first 'life-sized' canvases depicting interiors and architectural façades of the late 1960s and early 1970s, though now with the homogeneity of the surface dramatically interrupted by colourful passages in a contrasting highly detailed style.
Caulfield's signature linear language within a surface coated in a single hue is deftly deployed in the shadowy blue recesses of Sun Lounge, but with a complexity then relatively new to his work. With typical panache and self-effacing virtuosity, he teases the viewer into noticing the intricate network of chairs and suspended vessels only gradually after experiencing the initial impact of the sun-drenched passages of the picture; by mimicking the way in which one's eyes adjust gradually when moving from a bright space into a dimly lit one, he draws attention to the process of vision itself.
Sun Lounge is quintessential Caulfield in its subject, its architectural elegance and its wry observations of just slightly outmoded contemporary designs of the type lauded in previous seasons' interior design books and magazines. The artist delights its spatial ambiguities and conundrums that remain forever unsolvable. The illuminated cube within the blue area, for instance, might at first appear to represent an exterior view of a pale sky with flying birds, but on closer examination it seems instead to be a separate enclosure with subdued lighting and decorations of the flying-duck variety. It is left to us as viewers to decide and even to change our minds each time we look at the picture, for it is shaped deliberately as a space for dreaming and contemplation.
The paradoxical exchange between what might be described as the picture's festive palette and an atmosphere of aloneness and ennui gives Sun Lounge, like the best of Caulfield's paintings, its particular bittersweet tone. The imagery suggests shipboard architecture, and therefore the longueurs of a cruise, as much as it does the barren anonymity of luxury hotels. The space is unpopulated, even though the arrangement of comfortable seating suggests a site of sociability and conviviality. The artist taps into the mood one can so easily experience when seeking pleasure and escape from humdrum reality by going on holiday, only to find that one is stranded alone, in an unfamiliar place, confronted by the solitude of one's own thoughts. It is in this delicious state of reverie, as haunting as that exuded by the blocks of light in the architectural paintings of Caulfield's hero Edward Hopper, that we are left forever in limbo.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.
Caulfield's signature linear language within a surface coated in a single hue is deftly deployed in the shadowy blue recesses of Sun Lounge, but with a complexity then relatively new to his work. With typical panache and self-effacing virtuosity, he teases the viewer into noticing the intricate network of chairs and suspended vessels only gradually after experiencing the initial impact of the sun-drenched passages of the picture; by mimicking the way in which one's eyes adjust gradually when moving from a bright space into a dimly lit one, he draws attention to the process of vision itself.
Sun Lounge is quintessential Caulfield in its subject, its architectural elegance and its wry observations of just slightly outmoded contemporary designs of the type lauded in previous seasons' interior design books and magazines. The artist delights its spatial ambiguities and conundrums that remain forever unsolvable. The illuminated cube within the blue area, for instance, might at first appear to represent an exterior view of a pale sky with flying birds, but on closer examination it seems instead to be a separate enclosure with subdued lighting and decorations of the flying-duck variety. It is left to us as viewers to decide and even to change our minds each time we look at the picture, for it is shaped deliberately as a space for dreaming and contemplation.
The paradoxical exchange between what might be described as the picture's festive palette and an atmosphere of aloneness and ennui gives Sun Lounge, like the best of Caulfield's paintings, its particular bittersweet tone. The imagery suggests shipboard architecture, and therefore the longueurs of a cruise, as much as it does the barren anonymity of luxury hotels. The space is unpopulated, even though the arrangement of comfortable seating suggests a site of sociability and conviviality. The artist taps into the mood one can so easily experience when seeking pleasure and escape from humdrum reality by going on holiday, only to find that one is stranded alone, in an unfamiliar place, confronted by the solitude of one's own thoughts. It is in this delicious state of reverie, as haunting as that exuded by the blocks of light in the architectural paintings of Caulfield's hero Edward Hopper, that we are left forever in limbo.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.