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Art - Martin Gayford
All week something was bothering me. For a start I never knew
that Martin Gayford, the Spectator art critic who writes readable
art books, was an artist himself. And secondly I couldn’t
reconcile his erudite but jovial writing style with the one
work I’d seen, the rather haunting image of a girl’s
face superimposed into a winter tree, which we put on our
last page last week. When I got to HQ to have a sneak preview
of the exhibition of Gayford’s works, all was revealed.
It wasn’t the same Martin Gayford. This knowledge came
as something of a relief.
Martin Gayford the artist might be erudite, but he certainly
isn’t jovial. His exhibition is called Young Love. There
is very little colour in the work. He manages to make the
Grand Canyon look bleak. He either paints oil on canvas, or
takes doubly exposed photos, in which one ghostly image sits
on top of the main one. There are some paintings of Belgian
buildings, which strike me as having a photo-style composition
about them. I later learn they are representations of 1940’s
photos: one is of a deportation centre from which Belgian
Jews were sent to concentration camps. I like a few of the
American landscapes he has exhibited, especially when he has
extended is palette a little, and I like the photographs of
London, particularly the one taken outside The Tate, in which
a see-through girl lights a cigarette. Perhaps, though, this
is because she strongly reminds me of an ex girlfriend. Who
knows why we like or don’t like artworks? Go see for
yourself. AL |
