Carracci & Freud at Ordovas

5 October – 15 December

Painting from Life

Carracci Freud

Ordovas (in collaboration with Dulwich Picture Gallery)

25 Savile Row, London

www.ordovasart.com

Looking in at the exhibition 

This is a small exhibition of work consisting of six small portraits by Lucian Freud and three similarly-sized portraits by Annibale Carracci. I was really struck by this exhibition, and impressed by its frank historicity, painterly achievement and skill. No irony here. ‘Simple’ straightforward portraits where the details matter and the subtleties are considered.

The gallery has tried to create some comparisons between the works of the two artists, such as Freud’s portrait of Frank Auerbach (1975-76) where the sitter is older and looking downwards, and a Carracci portrait of an old balding man from the side (entitled ‘Head of an Old Man’ c.1590-92 – see no irony here whatsoever!). The face of an old woman painted by Carracci and three portraits of Freud’s mother fill another wall of the exhibition.

(Exhibition image from http://www.ordovasart.com)

You want to stand close to these, and the guard will warn you off, but it’s an intimate distance you want to achieve. Like being close enough to study every inch of the face of your dearest, you want to lose yourself in the intensity of looking. Or perhaps I should amend that. In these paintings there is such intimacy and intense familiarity and looking, that they can become entirely detail in a way that makes it almost impossible to see the overall whole. Like very close friends, whose faces we know so well, that they risk becoming almost invisible to us.

L: Lucian Freud Frank Auerbach, oil on canvas, 1975-76
R: Annibale Carracci Head of an Old Man, oil on canvas, c.1590-92

These are old paintings of old people, a subject often considered (by harsh contemporary standards anyway) as irrelevant and perhaps even grotesque. But it is expressly the age of these subjects that inspires such beautiful, strong and capable use of paint; qualities that I think reflexively reveal something about the sitters themselves. Carracci’s style is looser, more confident, with warmer tones. Freud is more obsessive, harsher, obviously laboured (but no less impressive), with so many layers of paint, that it, at times, overtakes the ‘person’.

There is a lot of sadness in these faces, but perhaps the emotion I'm seeing is more complex. These are all older faces, and I imagine their particular expressions and fascinating irregularities are the result of sitting long enough to have relaxed into their ‘natural’ expression, which after many years is invariably one of sorrow.

Here I see the worth of painting, or at least one of its worthy causes: recording our looking at others, and registering our desire to get closer. Perhaps these paintings even hint at a yearning to actually feel the skin of the other person, to be inside of another’s reality. But there is a point, and it becomes clear with Freud, that it can be possible to look with such forcefulness, that the person in front of us disappears into abstraction.

I have the sense that we don’t look like this anymore. This is impressive detail without high definition. It gives more ‘information’ than the highest resolution camera, and shows our capability for seeing. Yet it also reveals what we care to see, what we care about, and our struggles to see through familiarity.

Much has been written about both artists before and I shall not add to those histories here. But today, as I walk through London, it reminds me to take the time and energy to actually see what I'm looking at. 

Street view of gallery