Finally got to see this exhibition today - a satisfyingly comprehensive survey of Long's work. The slate and other stone installations were worth the entry charge alone. Although I have seen these and similar works many times in various Bristol galleries over the last twenty years or so, they are always very beautiful. They are unmediated by text and lens and I find them the most successful of Long's oeuvre. The wall paintings inspired by the I-Ching are equally impressive and have a monumental, almost Rothko-like intensity.
Long's relationship with landscape and wilderness could be seen as crudely interventionist and therefore essentially suspect but my own feelings towards him are far more charitable - he attempts to communicate both the internal and external landscape by framing his experiences within the taut limitations of measured time and space, resulting in an amalgam of mathematics and mysticism which I find wholly convincing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment