[00:00:00] Hey everyone, welcome back. Emily here. So glad that you could join us. So as you may have gathered from the title, we are looking at Matthew Krishanu, his exhibition at the Camden Art Center, The Bow Breaks. So this is an exhibition of painting lots and lots
[00:00:30] of new works from the artist, which is pretty cool. And Joana and I didn't necessarily see eye to eye on it. But I have to say this conversation for me was just really eye opening
[00:00:42] in terms of seeing what Joana saw and rethinking what I saw in light of it, which is the beauty of talking about exhibitions, right? Which is the beauty of art, taking us to new places
[00:00:55] and bringing in new ideas for us to consider and deepening how we think and experience art and life, dare I say. So I hope that you enjoy it and thanks for listening. Hello and welcome back to Exhibitionistas, the podcast where we go and see exhibitions and hopefully
[00:01:20] you do too. And we talk about them with you, simple as that. So this week we're going to be looking at Matthew Krishna's soulful exhibition, The Bow Breaks on display at the Camden Art
[00:01:32] Centre. My name is Emily Harding, I'm an art lover and an exhibition goer. And hello, thanks for being here. I'm very happy to be visiting the Camden Art Centre with you. I love it so, so much.
[00:01:47] It's a peaceful building where I have seen some of the most exciting exhibitions in my life. My name is Joanna Pierneves, I'm an independent writer and curator. And thanks, thank you for interacting with us on our Instagram account, by the way. We keep getting answers to our first
[00:02:05] question. Soon enough we will post a new one. So meanwhile, if you don't follow us, please do. Our account is exhibitionistas.com. You can get info about upcoming episodes and you can comment not only on the questions asked but also on the posts themselves. We're interested
[00:02:26] in knowing what you think, in knowing if we forgot to mention something or if you are excited about the information that we've shared in the podcast or if you have something else to say and who knows, maybe we'll read your contributions. So without further ado,
[00:02:47] let's get into it. Yeah, no, it has been absolutely brilliant to see some of the responses there. And it would be great, like if there's a bit of controversy. You say that you loved it,
[00:03:02] but I didn't love it or vice versa. I mean, let's get into the controversy of it. That's what it's all about is having a good chat about what we've experienced at exhibitions.
[00:03:15] But so before we get into it, Joanna, what was your week in culture like? I think you've had a big one. Yes, it was a packed week. I've just arrived from Lisbon last night.
[00:03:29] I went there to have a meeting of the director of one of the most beautiful museums in Europe called MATS, which is the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology because I have an exhibition there next year with it's a solo exhibition. So something close to our hearts
[00:03:48] with Isabelle Ferreira. He was a French artist, second generation Portuguese immigration, but she's based in France. She was born there. And so we went there to have a meeting. And then there was Arco Lisbon as well. So the art fair, which was incredible. I have to
[00:04:07] say the quality is up there. So kudos to the organization. There were so many people during the opening on the first day and the following days. It was really, really packed with interesting people, people who were asking the right questions. The galleries were happy.
[00:04:26] But while I was in the plane, I reconnected with an old love. So that was my week in culture pick, top pick this week, New Yorker Fiction podcast, which is incredible. I remember
[00:04:42] us talking about it back in the day. You recommended it to me and I quickly devoured almost all of them. And it's one of those things that like when Peter is away, when he's
[00:04:56] away for work. Yeah, exactly. I fell asleep to it. And it is just the most wonderful thing. Yeah. Or for my week. So I watched the Holdovers. Did you watch this? Paul Giamatti?
[00:05:09] I did. Yeah, nominated for an Oscar. And it's one I've been wanting to watch for a while because there was lots of buzz around it. Yeah. And just aesthetically, it looked really cool. It
[00:05:21] had a really distinct, very, very 70s style to it. And, you know, it had amazing performances. Divine Joy Randolph was particularly good. I wasn't bowled over by the movie. It felt too long. It was over two hours, I think. Really? It felt like something I'd seen before.
[00:05:41] Curmudgeonly guy that Paul Giamatti often plays, but who has a tender underbelly somewhere. And sorry, this is going to be a huge spoiler for anybody who hasn't watched it. There's
[00:05:54] like a sacrifice he makes. He falls on a sword at the end of the movie for the sake of one of the boys that he's been put in charge of, one of his students.
[00:06:05] So the whole thing is like they have to stay over at this private school over Christmas for all the boys that, you know, can't go home to their families over Christmas. And then,
[00:06:15] you know, most of them get sort of a free pass and leave with one of the other boys whose dad comes and picks him up, but there's just one boy left. And that's where
[00:06:25] sort of the relationship blossoms. And they have like a field trip to Boston and all this kind of stuff and they bond. And I don't know, like so... He seems so enthralled by the film. It's contagious.
[00:06:40] Yeah. I don't know. I whipped out my iPad during it. Peter got, I think he gave it more of a chance than I did. And it's not as though it's a bad movie. It's not a bad movie. It's
[00:06:52] just, it didn't feel like it was sort of breaking new ground. And you know, Peter and I talked about it and it was just, there's this kind of sentimentality that's infused in it
[00:07:02] that I didn't feel. I also read a novel, Big Swiss by Jen Began. It was hilarious. It was so funny. Laughed out loud. A hilarious novel. Tell me more. Yeah. Yeah. So my relationship to reading fiction is I read it before bed, which is
[00:07:24] usually like I struggle through a few pages before I just absolutely collapse. But I was like going to bed early to read this. Like it was just so good. It's about this 45 year old woman who, hey, I like 45 year old women. Hello.
[00:07:40] I mean, I'm a little older than that now, but you know, I'm in that territory and she's post breakup and she just does not have her stuff together. And she's moved to Hudson,
[00:07:52] sort of this like earthy wealthy, one of these places that likes to virtue signal quite a bit about quite a few things. And she's working as a transcriber for therapy sessions, therapy and quotes, because this guy isn't like a real therapist. He's, oh, I mean, he's, he's,
[00:08:14] yeah, he's like, he's not a bad guy, but he is very alternative and in ways that aren't suitable and unsuitable. But anyway, so she does that. And I don't want to give anything away because it is so good and so worth it. But yeah, she's the-
[00:08:34] What's the name? Big Swiss. Big Swiss. Big Swiss. Which in itself is a funny title. You know? It is funny. That's what I was thinking. Yeah, it's really good. It's quite, you know, it's sad and affecting in its own way, but very, very, very worth it.
[00:08:52] Okay. Gotcha. I'm going to get that one because I need some fiction in my life. I'm reading a lot of theory at the moment and I've been struggling to find something in all the books
[00:09:02] that I find are very dense and serious. And at the moment, I think I need some levity. This is exactly it. Because it's like, it's a levity and it's funny, but it's very good writing and very, very good storytelling.
[00:09:22] I have to say that I'm coming into this episode very fresh because of my travels. I didn't dig into Matthew Cresciano as I usually do. So I'm really looking forward to this one, you know, to being a bit more open about my experience and less into the
[00:09:41] research. So everything's in your hands, Amelie, and maybe it's time to introduce the artists. No pressure there. Well, it's a pleasure actually, because I didn't know anything. As is the case with me most of the time, I know nothing about anything until I go there.
[00:09:58] And it was a pleasure to kind of look into this artist who I, again, knew nothing about. But he, Matthew Cresciano is a British Bangladeshi artist that draws and paints the places
[00:10:13] and people in his life. If you were to put it simply, I think that's probably the way to talk about him. And this exhibition was such a wonderful experience. It was like soothing to the nervous system. But it wasn't, it also made you think, and it made you,
[00:10:32] you know, consider the, there's definitely ideas there that he's considering. But he does so in, you know, in this really kind of unprovocative way, which sounds like impossible. But we'll talk about that. So I'll note that I used a few resources
[00:10:52] for my research. There is a book, Matthew Cresciano, published by Annamie. I think that's how you'd say that. I bought it at the Camden Art Center, great book shop. It has wonderful images, of course, but also great text, which is high praise. I usually find
[00:11:12] the text in art books insufferable, you know, but this, the text in this book was great. And it has a really brilliant interview with Ben Luke, who coincidentally has a great podcast called A Brush With...and has a really great interview with Matthew.
[00:11:31] Matthew's website also has links to texts about his work that were really, you know, really great to thumb through. So Matthew was born in 1980 in Bradford, UK. He lived in Bangladesh between the ages of one and 12. His father was a missionary that first went
[00:11:51] to India on the hippie trail and met his mother, who was Indian, while teaching English. So Matthew's childhood memories, the exteriors and the interiors that made up his life in Bangladesh are a huge theme in his work that were derived, the paintings were
[00:12:10] derived largely from photographs that had been taken throughout his life. Other themes in his work include religion, obviously with his father being a missionary, but also colonialism, love, grief and race. With that description, you might think that, whoa, this is heavy,
[00:12:30] hard work stuff, but it's the opposite. As I said, he approaches these topics with tenderness and warmth. The lines are soft, the colors are cheerful, and he's so expressive with the paint itself. So Matthew started as a sculptor. He was applying to art school
[00:12:51] with his sculpture portfolio and wasn't getting any acceptance letters. And a couple things happened to change that trajectory. His mentor at the time was saying, look, Matthew, I don't see any of you in the sculptures. Like they just aren't
[00:13:06] alive in a way that you could only make these things alive. But his mentor did see him in the drawings for the sculptures. So I think that's a wonderful thing because it's like, where would he be without that sounding board, without that mentorship to kind of guide him
[00:13:28] and help him see what it is that he and only he can really express through his art? So I loved that. And this also made me think of our conversation about Lubaina Hamid's
[00:13:40] display at the RA. So this was a display that was a work in progress for a larger work, but yet very powerful and kind of, I mean, obviously she didn't change her trajectory. Maybe she did change her trajectory based on these smaller works. Maybe she was headed
[00:14:02] somewhere very different, and then she made these smaller works and it was like, ah, I know where I'm going to go and it might be somewhere different than I initially anticipated. But so that conversation with his mentor changed things for him. And then Matthew and his
[00:14:19] brother went to see a Basquiat show in Paris in 2002, and it inspired him to take drawing and painting more seriously. In one of the interviews he talks about how he'd seen lots of Basquiat's work, like in reproductions and books and whatever. But it was going there
[00:14:38] and seeing how he actually worked with the material and brought it to life that changed things for him. Yeah, that's such an interesting thing, the path you take as an artist and also the intelligence you have to have to listen. Because
[00:14:56] he could have been told, you know, you're in the drawings and just, you know, continued doing his thing in sculpture. I recently come across exactly the same story with an artist called Elika Hedayat. She's an Iranian artist who lives in Paris. And she
[00:15:14] asked me to interview her for her latest book. And so we started talking about her beginnings in Iran. So she studied in Iran first, and she wanted to do animation. And so she went
[00:15:27] to France. She wanted to, I think she applied to the Frénois, I think, I'm not quite sure. She really wanted to go into one type of school because she was into animation so much.
[00:15:39] And she also applied to the Beaux-Arts, you know, just like that, because she thought, you know, worst case scenario, I'll be at the Beaux-Arts, which is hilarious, because it's the most prestigious visual art school in France. And she was like,
[00:15:52] I don't know. That's my last chance, you know, if I get there, fine. So she was accepted. And so she worked in the Annette Messager's studio, which is a huge artist. So she was
[00:16:06] already, because that's how they work at the Beaux-Arts. You have artist studios and then you are in that studio or the other studio. And Annette Messager was a great mentor of hers.
[00:16:20] But then Christian Bernard came, he's a huge curator and he saw her work. And then he had a glimpse of her drawings in the corner and was like, Elika, that's where you are, that's it.
[00:16:34] These are important. And ever since she's been doing drawing, drawing is kind of the basis of her work, although she does painting. She does these really beautiful installations of paintings and drawings and murals that kind of connect all these works in her exhibitions.
[00:16:51] She also did a documentary called Tan, highly recommend it's about men's relationship with their bodies in Iran. Wow. So she was covered, you know, like filming, hiding her body as you have to now in Iran. And they were, there were, you know, bodybuilders
[00:17:10] and all kinds of men, men who had been at war and who had lost limbs, like all kinds of relationships with the idea of masculinity and the body is a really interesting documentary.
[00:17:22] So you have to be intelligent as well to listen to what you're told as that's, I think that's kind of the story, isn't it? Totally. And we all have these conceptions of who we want to
[00:17:35] be in the world that might be different than who we are in the world, you know? Like, so this is a very small comparison. So I like, so for the longest time I took, you know, I took
[00:17:50] piano lessons as a kid and, you know, every now and then- You're so musical. I forget. I mean, like lower your expectations. But yeah, I mean, like music has been in my life. I'm not
[00:18:04] saying that I am a great musician, but I've always had this concept that like, you know, being able to play the piano really well or being able to do a stringed instrument of some
[00:18:16] kind is the way to go. And, you know, last year for my birthday, I bought myself a ukulele and was kind of banging some things out on it. But it's just not, it's just not like,
[00:18:29] I had a realization recently that I'm like, you know, I just, I am a rhythm person. Like, I'm never going to be a melody. Like that's- A melody person. A melody person. Like,
[00:18:42] you know, and I, but in my mind, I have a hierarchy of what's good and what you should want to be. And you should want to be able to play like recognizable tunes on the piano. Yeah, we have to say to our listeners that you are a drummer.
[00:18:58] I'm a drummer. Yeah, exactly. And it's great because we- So I'm going to Minnesota in July and we have a very wholesome time when we go camping with my family. And my brother is an
[00:19:11] amazing musician. Like he is all by ear and he just plays the guitar and all of that stuff. So part of the reason I bought this ukulele- I know. I wish. Yeah, I wish. Part of the reason
[00:19:23] I bought this ukulele was my niece who's a brilliant singer. Like she has a fantastic voice. She got a ukulele and she was kind of like playing along with my brother's guitar and we
[00:19:36] were all singing and stuff like that. And so that's why I got this ukulele, which I mean, I could probably bang out a few chords here and there and just about hang on. But instead,
[00:19:49] Peter got me some claves and he got me to play along around- A rhythm woman. Around the guitar because obviously I can't take my drum kit, right? So it got me a little jaker and I know. Look at that.
[00:20:08] And that is love, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, he's like, yeah. That is someone who knows you, Emily. That is someone who knows you and who respects you for who you are and admires the heck out of it. And it's funny
[00:20:23] because for me, drumming is the highest form. Oh yeah. I'm a rhythm person. I'm not very sensitive to melody, to be honest with you. I'm not into- I love baroque music, but then when it comes to those big symphonies and you know, I have my favourites. I'm not
[00:20:44] going to say I don't like it. I do. I love piano. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. But I do realise that I'm a voice slash rhythm person for sure. Like baroque
[00:20:58] polyphony just drives me up the wall in a good sense. It just does stuff to me, you know? And I mean, can I say Monteverdi, Purcell, you know, that's my jam. Yeah. I mean, and I, you know, it's like, I love listening to it and all that,
[00:21:15] but in terms of like actually having any aptitude for playing it, it's just not within my gift. So it's like, there is that difference. I mean, you know, with Matthew Krishno, he could have said, no, sculpture is like in my mind the ideal and obviously
[00:21:35] that's where I should go. And that's what I want to get good at rather than following the innate path inside of you. And I just love that there was a mentor there who was like,
[00:21:46] hey, check out this mirror, Matthew. This is what you're good at. You know what I mean? And that shaped his relationship to art. But I don't want to say that you should do whatever you're told to do, because I think
[00:22:05] that if he listened, it's because he saw something and it resonated with him. Because you are told outrageous things in art schools. I'm usually a guest lecturer and I do lots of studio visits and sometimes the students tell me what they're told. And I'm like, no, no, no,
[00:22:22] no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you know, no, you know, just go. And I have to hide my, you know, my bafflement. But yeah, so be careful out there. You know, if you're
[00:22:36] listening to this and you're a student, it has to feel like, what I always tell my kids you have to feel like home. It has to feel like home to you. And sometimes you don't want home.
[00:22:48] You want something else. You want what you were saying, that idea of what you think is the great thing to do, the hierarchy in your head. But then there's something else that feels like
[00:22:59] home. Totally. Yeah. So Matthew finished his BA at Exeter and fine arts and English literature in 2001. English literature. Yeah, I know. Okay. Interesting. Right. Okay. And then so in 2001, so then you think about that Basquiat show was in 2002. So that's the big turning point.
[00:23:24] Yeah. And then he completed an MA in fine art at Central Saint Martin College of Art and Design in 2009. So there was a bit of time, you know, like, and I love that too.
[00:23:36] I love that though it wasn't like Bosch realization, and then you're just on your way, you know, it's like, you know, there was some time in between. And, you know, he's obviously
[00:23:49] most of the exhibition we're going to talk about his painting is a bit of drawing in there, but he's, you know, he morphed as an artist within that time as well. So he's been featured in group shows every year since 2014. And he's had 11 solo shows since 2018,
[00:24:07] which seems exhausting. It's a lot of output. Gosh, that's a lot. It is right? That's a lot of output. I was going to ask you like, is this like, because I mean, well, yeah, it depends, because he's represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery, for example, in Berlin. So
[00:24:24] it these might include smaller shows in galleries and solo shows, maybe in art fair booths. I don't know. So it really depends because it's one thing to have like a massive solo show, 11 massive
[00:24:39] solo shows, and then you can have solo shows that are smaller and smaller spaces. But to be honest, it's quite a lot. A lot of solo shows. It's more than once a year, isn't it?
[00:24:50] So there was one year that he had, he had like several. But yeah, it could be very well be that it was, you know, smaller, I guess. Or it could be touring shows. So maybe showing the
[00:25:04] same works in several countries. So that could also be because if he's represented by a gallery in Berlin, he may be touring some of his shows, you know, that could also be but painters are
[00:25:17] prolific. They're in not all of them. But it's kind of a prolific form of art, I'd say. Yeah. And for Matthew, he said that it's important for him to paint what you know, kind of that
[00:25:32] old adage and paint what you love. He mentioned a commission that he took to paint someone that he didn't know. And he just couldn't do it. He was like, I had 20 tries, and it just
[00:25:44] wasn't coming together. I don't know if he ever delivered it. But you see this in his images. So a lot of the images are of he and his older brother in Bangladesh. So you see these two boys
[00:25:56] on a boat, on a pier, in a tree. And it's, you know, it's almost like looking at two halves of one hole, you know, I mean, and yeah, and, you know, you, you know, there's obviously
[00:26:09] a lot of his family and of people in places that he loves. And yeah, so obviously that's, you know, that's a huge thing for him. You see images of his wife and of his daughter, his wife, the writer, Ushi Gatward. Sadly, she passed away at the age of 49
[00:26:28] from cancer in 2001. Oh, gosh, just awful. I mean, she got like a stage four when she was diagnosed at stage four. And these are really moving scenes in the show of his wife
[00:26:43] and his daughter. And again, so it's like grief, you know, loss of letting go of all of these really big things. But yet he brings you into them so gently. And, you know, he makes it easy to stay there for a while, which I really, really liked.
[00:27:04] This exhibition is really about loss, isn't it? Not only about loss through death, but also loss of a place and a childhood landscape because you do see him, you do see two boys with him and his brother. So you see that and they kind of come together,
[00:27:25] these images and the motifs in the paintings. Yeah. So Matthew tends to work in series of paintings. He has a House of God series in Sickness and in Health, Mission series. They're all dealing with distinct ideas, but similar images can be seen across them.
[00:27:44] So the boys, his family, et cetera. And, you know, it's I mean, so you might even see a similar painting in different ways. So there's a very famous painting in the exhibition and one
[00:27:58] that I think, you know, people might recognize for him. And so the painting is called Mission School. And in this painting, you see the backs of brown school children in a classroom
[00:28:14] looking at an image of the Last Supper. And then in the book that I got, you see that similar scene in a slightly different way. And because it was part of a different series,
[00:28:28] part of a different iteration of it. And I find that kind of difficult because you fall in love with one and then you see sort of a facsimile that's not quite right of it
[00:28:42] somewhere else. But I like having to get over that hump, you know what I mean? Of no, hold on, hold on. This isn't right. The floor is pink in this one and the kids are looking a little
[00:28:59] bit different. You know, and I kind of like that that's there even though I find it a little bit frustrating. But so there's so much to unpick with his work, but maybe it's time to look at the exhibition. Joanna, do you want to take us through the show?
[00:29:16] Pleasure. So the exhibition is set in a very specific way because as you arrive upstairs, there's a sort of a rectangular hall where, you know, I'd call it a hall. I don't know if
[00:29:30] that's the name of it, where from where you go into the big exhibition rooms. So in this hall, there was a choice, a choice was made to show much smaller works. And they have figures that
[00:29:48] are sort of diluted into the paint and the elements that the paint represents such as water. There is one small painting where a boy is swimming. It says so in the title. So
[00:29:59] we know it's personal. We know it's kind of someone he knows or himself. And it looks like the boy is pushing the paint. It's really striking. And most of these works, so these very small works are from 10 years ago or more, you know, like drafts, if you will.
[00:30:20] There is one exception to this. There's a bigger painting, which is sort of midsize, like 70 by 50 or something of a grotto or a cave with a religious display above. So really at the
[00:30:33] top of the painting, like a sort of an afterthought. And the whole painting is taken over by a sort of a dark entrance of the cave at the bottom of which you see devotional candles, but it's
[00:30:46] mostly a sort of a black void, a black mysterious hole. And so then you move into the first exhibition room and there's huge paintings like they're really, really big and they take up
[00:31:02] the space, which is no small feat as it's a very high ceilinged room. So there are two Banyan Tree paintings to your left where the roots take up a lot of space and the figures of
[00:31:15] one or two boys are up there, almost minute in this lavish nature. And then facing them, there are two very big portraits format field paintings, I would call them. They are bizarre because a field would probably be painted on a horizontal landscape like format. But here,
[00:31:37] as you approach, you're supposed to feel engulfed by the soil or the grass. There's two of them. One is sort of yellow beige and the other one is green, like grass green.
[00:31:48] So up there in each painting, there's a strip of buildings that the painter did not care to paint too specifically. It's all about the field. So as you walk towards them, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's I mean, so those are part of the House of God series.
[00:32:06] And, you know, those are, you know, buildings, as you said, you know, with big sort of color studies, I guess that are that are underneath or above. Like he has other ones,
[00:32:19] the two in the show, all of the color is underneath. But he has other ones in the book where the color is above. Right. And they're so in contrast with the Banyan Tree
[00:32:32] images, because those Banyan Tree, I think those were the Banyan Trees that had lots of paint drip in them. So they just look really wild and Banyan Trees. So like they can grow outward indefinitely. Like they just keep growing extra trunks. They're like huge houses. Yeah,
[00:32:53] yeah, they're they're the most incredible things. And he captures that feeling that immensity of these Banyan Trees and the boys are just tiny little figures, you know, climbing around. Yeah. And so on the right, you have a painting with two boys
[00:33:10] behind the carcass of a big animal. And you can see that these I think that's the one that made me think this is painted after a photograph, because it's so awkward. Like the boys are just kind of looking at the camera, probably wanting to look at the carcass,
[00:33:28] but they're not looking at the carcass. So I thought kids would be kind of like either moving away from it or, you know, in some way interacting with it, but not just ignoring
[00:33:38] it. So I thought they were posing for a photograph. And on the other side, there's a huge painting with a big sculpture and again, a boy on top of the sculpture. I don't quite
[00:33:47] remember that one as well. And then you move to the other room through a wall of smaller drawings. So there are the famous drawings that made him realize that that's what he should be doing. They seem like drafts, studies, but they exist on their own. They're quite,
[00:34:06] you know, very different because they are on different kinds of paper. And then you see another set of pictures and you realize that this exhibition mixes past and present as you have the painter and his brother in a few paintings. One of them of two exhausted
[00:34:26] boys on a couch, seemingly after a walk outdoors in Cornwall, as the title indicates, still wearing cold weather clothes. And then you have photos of his family, wife and daughter in the Epping Forest. So there's kind of a double thing, a doppelganger kind of thing going on
[00:34:46] where you kind of, there's trees of the Epping Forest, there's a manian tree. So he kind of looks for similarities and differences, you know, of course within the similarity. And finally, you have the last room where you have what seems to be photo-based paintings
[00:35:04] of his family in Bangladesh, I presume. Especially his father who was a priest in religious spaces and settings. Again, pretty large paintings that take up the whole room, the home is quite filled. And then you have the, for me, the epitome of the exhibition,
[00:35:22] which is a very, very small painting for once of Jesus on a cross. And you can see that it's not Jesus himself, it's not a depiction of the crucifixion, but it's probably taken from a photograph. It's a sculptural piece, so a sculpted crucifix, probably from the family's
[00:35:44] archive. So I think this is it. You know, I hope my description is vivid enough. So we'll make it more so after the interval when we'll talk about colour, themes, religion and much more. So we'll meet you right after this small break.
[00:36:22] And we're back, we're here at Camden Art Centre with Matthew Krishna's exhibition, The Bow Breaks. Shall we talk about the title? Because it's very expressive and I think he does explain it at some point. Yeah, definitely. And his previous exhibition was Out on a Limb.
[00:36:43] So there's definitely a theme kind of going on there. And I mean, he talked about, you know, that whole relationship to being on a branch and kind of putting yourself out there
[00:36:57] and pushing things as far as they can go. I mean, I think he talks about that in terms of his painting, that he wants to do that within his painting. But then that is obviously happening in life as well. Yeah, he's referring to the boys on the trees,
[00:37:16] on the branches and how incredibly dangerous it is in hindsight. You know, when you look at those pictures and you think, what were my parents doing? Why was I on top of a banyan tree?
[00:37:29] And how horrible, you know, it could have happened. And when you know that the context of the exhibition is also a lot about loss, you kind of almost grieve the thing that could have happened. You know, in your childhood, you look back and you think, there's a moment
[00:37:47] in not my childhood, but in my early years of motherhood, where I think about this once a month where we parked the car. I had two kids at the time, the two older ones. We parked
[00:38:03] the car, we were taking care of Arthur who was a baby and Constance, she could walk already. She got out of the car. We were in the middle of a very busy road. So we parked alongside
[00:38:17] the very busy road and she started walking towards the road. And for some magical, I don't know, intervention of some kind of some gracious goddess somewhere, I saw her and I grabbed her and the car was just coming. She could have just not been here. And I think
[00:38:38] about that all the time. Traumatizing. Like as a parent, that is traumatizing. I mean, just the thought of that. Yeah. Like for his parents though, like this was 80s parenting, was it not? Yeah. Like, yes, it was. I told this story to colleagues recently. So
[00:38:58] when I was growing up, my parents had one car. So my mom would go and pick up my dad at work. You know, he had somebody who could drive him to work, but then she would pick
[00:39:07] him up sometimes. So she would load all four of us in the giant Buick we had, you know, with like a bench seat in the front and a huge backseat. Of course, it was 1979. So no seatbelts,
[00:39:20] you know, like that was just not a thing. What are those? It'll damage the child, right? I mean, it'll break the internal organs if it's a lap belt. But my mom had to stop
[00:39:32] and get gas on the way to pick up my dad. And I was like, oh, I was, and I rattled on the door, like to open the door because I was like, I want to come in. I want to like look at the
[00:39:44] snacks that they have by the register, basically kind of drool over some, you know, of course, just peanut butter cups or whatever. And my mom was like, now you stay in the car.
[00:39:54] And so I stayed in the car. I had opened the door a bit. So when she went to leave the gas station, of course, I was sulking against this door and just leaning against
[00:40:07] it completely, like just absolutely crestfallen for not having been able to go in. And of course, fell out of the car and my sister started screaming. My mom stops the car. She gets out of the car, comes around, realized she had stopped on me. Like my little four
[00:40:28] year old leg was underneath this enormous 1970s Buick. And so you get in the car and like, oh, back off of me. So she gets, she backs the car off of me, takes me to
[00:40:43] the hospital. And it was the weirdest thing I went, I got to the hospital and they were like, Emily point to the leg that hurts. And I pointed to the leg that did not have tire marks on it.
[00:40:55] I know, right? My poor mother, my poor mother. And now this story has been retold over the decades. You know, I did not tear anything. I wasn't limping. You know, there wasn't even like my mom was like, there wasn't even like a bruise swelling or something. You
[00:41:24] know, I didn't. Yeah. Emily, Emily, maybe it's a miracle. It was a miracle. It's obviously a miracle, Joanna. Why didn't you take this to church? But you know, I don't want to extend this conversation to 80s parenting. I'm just going
[00:41:42] to put this out there. So Diogo had one sister, a brother, and then his mother remarried to a man who had three children. So at a certain point, they were like, it was a crowd inside the
[00:41:56] car. Brady Bunch situation. Yeah. Brady Bunch situation. And so the solution they found for the baby, so Diogo's younger brother was to build a small hammock into the back of the car.
[00:42:13] Just like to fling the baby better, you know, if they did it in the car. So the kid was in the hammock. In the sun. So like in the back window kind of thing or? I don't know how they did it. Let's just bake the baby.
[00:42:33] Just bake it and fling it if we hit another car or if we break too hard. Off goes the baby. Wow. No, Jesus. Honestly, how did we survive? Yeah, that is next level though. A hammock for the baby.
[00:42:53] Perfect solution. And they must have been so proud of themselves. Totally. Oh, they were dining out on that. You know what we did? We got a hammock for the baby and now it's all fine. And dinner, you know, and everybody, all their friends like,
[00:43:08] wow, we should do the same. They probably started the trend in Portugal back in the day. Oh my god. That is insane. That is insane. Yeah. Crazy. Anyway, going back to the exhibition. So I'm curious to know,
[00:43:27] how did you, so did you stay for a long time in the hall or did you kind of like just breeze through it and go straight to the big paintings? Here's my problem. My problem was
[00:43:38] that Matthew Krishna was there when I was there. Oh, I mean, so I was like completely distracted. So I walked into that first area you mentioned with all of the small paintings.
[00:43:52] And then I went forward into the paintings that had like his dad as, you know, a missionary and kind of the more religious pain. Oh, you went the other way. You went straight ahead. Okay. And he was in there with a friend, like talking and I was like,
[00:44:11] I have to say it ruined the experience. And it was because it was like, there was this part of me that wanted to go out to him and be like, I'm here for a podcast to talk about your thing.
[00:44:20] And then there was part of me that was like, no, you just kind of like just be with these paintings. It's funny because you're an artist magnet. You saw the Fianna Barbary why first went into the childhood paintings, like the two boys together. And then I saw the
[00:44:36] religious room. But I'm curious to know what you thought because I remember going in and the paintings are so big that I didn't feel like approaching them. And then I thought I remembered him talking about the drips of paint and the banyan trees
[00:44:53] because so the tree trunks are not very realistically rendered. So his type of painting is very much lines that are quite free, but very masterful. And then the banyan trees are
[00:45:07] kind of like drips. He let the paint kind of drip down, trickle down. And as I approach the painting, you kind of feel engulfed by the tree and then you look at the painting on the
[00:45:20] left, you look up and there's a boy in the tree. And it almost like replicates the experience I presume of the parents or whoever, or maybe himself thinking of himself in projecting onto some
[00:45:38] grown up who would have been there and watching the children play. And it's almost like a sort of lifelike experience. He's almost kind of trying to replicate that feeling of of the immensity of the tree and then the small child lost somewhere in there and about to
[00:45:59] disappear into the branches. And I was kind of, I, you know, immediately my thought was what is this image doing to me? You know, because after Ariadne, and it is a very traditional replication, representation, trying to replicate through representation a feeling or an impression
[00:46:23] or a situation. And I didn't connect to it. I have to say I wasn't feeling engulfed by the tree. I understood that that was the intention, but because they're very photographic, the paintings, and I think the carcass one is really gives it away.
[00:46:41] The subjects are kind of stiff, I found, you know, and repainting a photograph is a massive, I mean, lots of people do that, you know, drawing and painting. You work a lot from even projected images. People don't want to acknowledge that, but most realists, realistic
[00:47:02] drawings and paintings we see are projected images projected onto the canvas or the drawing. And then the artist, you didn't? That's funny. Yeah, it happens a lot. Most artists do that. It's too difficult to work from a small printed photograph. And so you project onto
[00:47:22] the canvas. I mean, I think art even representational figurative art is much more mechanic than we think it is. But then there's that moment where you appropriate the image and then it becomes something that you're thinking about, and then you're remaking.
[00:47:37] And the drips of paint and that kind of the the the kind of sort of very abstract part of the painting of the branches is really beautiful from afar. And it's it's kind of
[00:47:51] mesmerizing and it takes you to the painting. But again, you know, I started asking myself where is the photograph? Where is the painting? And I could see that it was these masterful lines
[00:48:07] in the case of the banyan trees. And then you turn your back and you have the fields and it's much more work on color. His colors are very specific as well, but I didn't feel
[00:48:18] I felt like there was a performative aspect to them where as a viewer, you were supposed to be there and feel kind of like buried into the ground, like almost in those fields that he
[00:48:30] depicted. But in the end, there's the painting with a big sculpture and I stay there because I thought, OK, I'm a bit conflicted about this. I'm not feeling the exhibition. And then I stay
[00:48:43] there and started writing a little bit my impressions. And then someone got in and did exactly the same thing. They didn't approach the paintings. It's just they went through the room and they weren't in a hurry because then they were at the cafe working. So maybe they were
[00:48:57] in a hurry for work, I don't know. But it the the immensity of the paintings kind of were conflicting to me. I didn't quite know how to and there was no entry point into the paintings.
[00:49:13] They were kind of like very wall-like. I don't know. I'm I didn't have the same feeling you did. I think we had a very different experience. Yeah, I mean, it's I see what you mean about the
[00:49:27] image, like the people being a bit stiff in them. And maybe that is an element of the photograph kind of making it in. But, you know, it's like, I mean, you compare his relationship to photography to say Gerhard Richter's who, you know, he was
[00:49:45] recreating a photograph in a very literal way. And, you know, my impression of Matthew Krishno is that he's trying to do it in a painterly way. You know, he's trying to do something that only painting can do. So like the drips in the Banyan tree, obviously,
[00:50:08] that's a very painterly stroke. But yeah, I mean, I enjoy color on canvas and when it's that big and when you feel when you can feel the movement of the color in the paint.
[00:50:28] I found that part of it quite thrilling. And I did feel sort of that immensity of the tree. There's a few paintings that he has with that kind of perspective. Like there's that one with
[00:50:40] the kid standing on the play equipment looking down at you. Yes, but I find that a lot of his human figures are not exactly proportional or they feel childlike in a way. I mean, in the. You know, there are there sometimes they just they don't look quite
[00:51:09] like human. That is true. Yeah, it's true. Even in the other room where you have the most religious settings, the priest and the congregation around the priest, they are painted in a way that looks, yeah, a little bit childish. That all the people,
[00:51:33] the way they're painted, they're painted in a way as if they had remained children. There's something about the way they're painted that kind of and you have in the drawings, you can see the way he makes the faces and it is kind of a minimal gesture.
[00:51:55] He's not into painting over and over and over until you have a lifelike face. So, you know, in the smaller paintings and the ones in the hallway, the thing is that the characters, so the people, the two boys, there's one that I really love,
[00:52:18] which is the boy in the bed that you see afterwards in a bigger size. And there's the last supper in the frame of the bed. So the bed has a frame. It's not a frame.
[00:52:33] What do you call the kind of sort of ceilings of the beds? Yeah, so like it's a four poster canopy bed. I think they call them. Yes, that's it. Yeah, it will not be able to say it again.
[00:52:45] Yes, it's a canopy bed. That's it. And the canopy is the edges of the painting, one side of it and the kid is in there and there's no attention to the face. It doesn't matter.
[00:53:04] It's all about the head that's slightly bent and then there's the last supper behind it and that's such a strong painting that must be like, what, 15 centimetres by 30 or 27 or something. It's the smallest painting. And my theory is that he's not really interested in the body
[00:53:23] and in the facial expressions. And so he gets them done quite quickly. But in the big paintings, for me, that's quite problematic. You know, it gives the characters a certain stiffness
[00:53:37] and especially the paintings of his wife, you know, where you see her face when she's lying in bed and she just looks like a beautiful. It's just a beautiful face with one, two, three, four, five,
[00:53:49] six, seven, eight black lines. Yeah. And she looks very I hate to say this, but she looks very nondescript, you know? It's not her wife. It's the situation he's interested in. It's the setting. It's the beds. It's the bed frame. Do you know what? I don't have any
[00:54:14] vocabulary for beds. I don't know what to call them. The headboard or is that what you're saying? The headboard. But yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I think that he does go for kind of
[00:54:31] emotion and feeling more than kind of, you know, technical sort of prowess. I think that is part of it. But the technical prowess is what brings the emotion. Yeah. And that's for me, the issue
[00:54:47] is that I feel there's a sort of flatness because, I mean, there are paintings in the other room with the religious church and the ceremony, the religious ceremonies that I don't know a lot
[00:55:00] about. I have to say they didn't have a religious upbringing. So for me, this is very foreign. And I didn't feel that there's any place in the painting where I thought they were very traditional and there is no scratch in the recording. You know, there's no glitch
[00:55:21] in the matrix. These are almost, they almost feel like paintings that are emulating the church that you could find in kind of a progressive modern church as kind of illustrative of what's
[00:55:35] going on in there. I didn't feel, apart from the Jesus Christ that I found the crucifix that I found really striking and incredibly moving because I can see a child looking at the figure of Christ
[00:55:54] and all the stories around Christ and that's how you enter into religion when you're a kid sometimes, not for everyone. You can see that it was an issue for me when I was a child.
[00:56:06] I was in Madeira with my parents and I go into a church. My parents never took me to church. They didn't baptize me, probably the same, the only person in my generation in Portugal who
[00:56:15] wasn't baptized. And I go into this church and I see the crucifixion and I see this bloody man and I look at my mom and ask him what happened? You know, like really in a panic,
[00:56:28] like what is this? Why are we looking at this? This is horrifying. And my mom had to take me out. Yeah, wow. She had to take me out of the church. Yeah, that was shocking as a kid.
[00:56:41] I was like four or five or so maybe that's why, maybe that's my connection, you know, but it's strange that you need the personal connection because he is talking about his life. While I was going through in the way that he paints his figures,
[00:56:58] you know, kind of these soft clean lines and each of the characters they can often be sort of isolated in their own way. It made me think of Edward Hopper. You know, some of the characters
[00:57:11] were quite, I mean, isolated. I mean, if you like, I don't know if you can see that. Yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes. You know, it's like the people in, so I'm showing Joanna
[00:57:25] for those of you who are listening, a version of Mission School, of the Mission School painting. And it's, you know, there's figures in it and they are together but they feel separate at the same time. And I don't know, there was... Yes, yeah, there's a sort of isolating.
[00:57:47] Yeah, they're isolated. Yeah, true. And they're all absorbed in their own activities. Heads are bent a lot in the paintings, the religious paintings at the end. Even the carcass, the carcass painting really kind of struck me as
[00:58:08] very much not wanting to over-interpret a photo and really thinking about whatever was going on in the mind. Maybe it was a good decision because that's kind of the entry point for me. I was a bit like, why are these kids not looking at the carcass?
[00:58:27] You know, they're not looking at death. And now I'm thinking about it and I'm thinking that was a good choice actually because that's... I keep going back to that and it kind of
[00:58:36] prefigures the issue of death with his wife. You see a painting of his wife at the bottom of the tree as you do when you are looking at the banyan tree. She's doing the same thing
[00:58:50] you do when you get closer to the painting, but it's in the Epping forest with their daughter. And he says that she was already quite ill in that painting or maybe photograph that he took
[00:59:01] of them. So there's kind of this unwillingness maybe that children will have of considering or this unfathomable idea of death that you have to contemplate when you're a missionary son that you're told about all the time, but it's so abstract.
[00:59:20] Yeah. And I mean, I think too, depending on where you are, you might be seeing carcasses like that reasonably frequently. I mean, it... True. Parts of a carcass. I was walking my dog the other day and he found part of the lamb
[00:59:38] carcass kind of out here in the wilds of Wiltshire. I mean, you'll see stuff like that a lot more. And I guess if you're in Bangladesh in the 80s, in the countryside, maybe that's...
[00:59:54] I mean, it does then beg the question of why would it be a photograph moment, but maybe it was a fine specimen of a carcass or nose. But yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. That gazing at the camera does make you feel like you're looking at
[01:00:13] a photograph kind of set up. Yeah, I was surprised because I thought if you're digging in... Do you know what? I almost felt maybe it's too soon for him. He's grieving. And I felt like the story was behind the paintings. I felt like someone was leafing
[01:00:35] through their photos and it was a reckoning, some form of reckoning with life, with losing one's parent, with losing one's wife, one's partner, one's companion, the weight it has on the child that lost their mom. And I almost felt maybe it's too soon. Maybe it's
[01:00:55] too soon to be... He needs to paint it for sure. He's a painter all throughout. You can see that's his life. That's what he breathes, what he thinks. That's his body. It's in there.
[01:01:10] But I almost felt like there was some veiling more than revealing in the paintings. And I kept thinking what's behind them, you know, what's behind them, almost physically. Like did he paint something behind? How did he start these paintings? Because I did not feel...
[01:01:31] And the thing, the weird thing is that the entrance, the hall, I love the paintings. I love those paintings and I think those paintings are very atmospheric. It doesn't really matter what the figures look like. There's also this thing of you can't
[01:01:52] really understand what these people look like. They're all alike. They're not individualized. And in the smaller paintings, it doesn't matter. You don't have space to draw a face. It really is not the point. And the point is the matter, it's the water,
[01:02:12] it's the cave. There's several paintings of sky. There's a lot of blue. Yeah, there's one that's called, I think it's called Night Swimming. And it's... You know the one I mean? It's basically... Yeah, I have it here.
[01:02:35] Yeah, it's like there's a kid who, I think it's a kid, who is swimming and it's kind of like maybe far enough out from the shore that it's dangerous, but also far enough that it's fun. Like I don't get the sense he's in distress, you know?
[01:02:56] But he doesn't know how dangerous his fun is. Yeah, because he has no idea. He's in the swell. But he's enjoying a beautiful, I guess almost sunset from his position. Yeah. But yeah, it wraps up like all of this beauty and precariousness of where this kid is
[01:03:17] and it says so much. Like as you said, it's a small frame. It's a small painting, but I agree. And the way that figures... He renders figures in those small frames is just so wildly different. They're so expressive. Yeah.
[01:03:34] Yes, I think in the smaller paintings, it's really beautiful to see because he does what Hopper did, which is to just make the body expressive and not care about the details. It's not about that. It's like he wants to preserve his intimacy and his privacy
[01:03:56] and his life, but he wants to talk about that experience. And he wants to talk about emotions and experiences. And the small paintings, just do it for me. They're on paper. They're oil on paper and they're just so incredibly moving and so incredibly expressive.
[01:04:15] Whereas the bigger paintings, he has to stretch out these figures and he has to make decisions about these figures and the decisions he made. I mean, for me, I'm sure they will move lots of other people and maybe
[01:04:30] people who have had closer experiences to what his life is, maybe will see it differently. But for me, they made it quite difficult to connect. It felt like augmented figures rather than really specific bodies. I mean, the Cornwall
[01:04:52] painting is quite nice. I really love that one. But again, I think it's a smaller painting where the kids, you can just feel like they're exhausted after the walk. They're freezing. They came from Bangladesh. It's fucking freezing in Cornwall. There's wind
[01:05:08] and they just cannot believe what happened to them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you're right. It's like there's another one of the small paintings of two boys on a log over this raging river. They're just very high perch on the log.
[01:05:28] And there's kind of, and the one right next to that is them on the boat, on the front of the boat in a very placid lake. And it just, I don't know, there's something about the storytelling there about that discovery as a young person and not
[01:05:44] knowing necessarily that, oh, we're in calm waters now or actually we are over something really precarious. It's just that discovery of what all these different feelings are. And you're going to know them so that you can spot them later on.
[01:06:06] But yeah, I agree. Of the bigger paintings, the ones that I felt were the ones where he was really working with the paint. So I really loved the paint dripping in the banyan tree. The banyan trees, they're quite beautiful. And I loved the
[01:06:23] color studies. There's just so much going on. But I think what I liked about the bigger paintings and maybe just about the imagery was that he painted his father as sort of a white guy clergy in third person. It wasn't sort of like... Yeah, that's true.
[01:06:45] He was seeing his father, but it was these images of him putting liturgical wear on the brown people that are around him. And it says so much about colonialism and about the kind of conversion into missionaries wanted to convert people to Christianity. For solidizing. Yeah, solidizing. Thank you.
[01:07:19] But it says so much about that while without losing some of the grace and love that these people, presumably his dad, genuinely had about that mission. So it's both ends. There's part of you that feels uncomfortable with it and maybe he feels uncomfortable with it.
[01:07:42] But there's also a big part of it that it came from an understanding of what love is and what grace is and all of that. That's the part of his work that I really,
[01:07:53] like, and even the grief bits. It's like his wife as she's sitting there on that pier with his daughter or in the tree, the weight of his wife in those pictures, it's heavy. It's really, really heavy and it's very simplistically rendered. But I mean,
[01:08:17] there's a lot of power to it too. And I think too, Epping Forest and Connott Water, which is the water that she's on, she and his daughter, those are very familiar places for me
[01:08:30] as well. We live in North London and have spent just so much time around Connott Water and in that area. And I think that's part of it too, is just a personal connection for me.
[01:08:46] I really appreciate the fact that he goes into notions of race and religion with that both end feeling. That's what I got with those. The colours are more cheerful. The people are not angry or unwilling. They're just there doing this thing that these cultures have
[01:09:11] collided and this is what's happening. And there will be rectifications, but he's not necessarily engaging with that. He's sort of capturing the how. Yeah. And the normalcy of it, of us on the outside saying, oh, this is a colonial process
[01:09:31] that's still going on. And that left its marks and left its religions and its mores and you know, all of these things and beliefs. And he saw it as something that was real.
[01:09:47] It was just an everyday thing for him. And it's true that you can see it as something that has no asperities. Everything is soft, soft curves painted in soft curves. The heads are very round,
[01:10:03] the shoulders are super curved. Everything is done with a delicate soft touch. They're painting they're sinuous and at the same time not too serpentine. The shapes, they're really round and the colours, the whites are very bright and it's very yellow as well. I imagine it's the
[01:10:27] colour of the sun there. I just came back from Portugal and my light is bright white light that burns your retinas. Whereas maybe that's the light he remembers, everything very yellow. It is true that there's something of acceptance. And when you're talking about grief,
[01:10:52] where and when and how is the acceptance coming in? And that's why the Christ is so interesting for me because it's kind of sideways. It's not an upfront Christ. So you can imagine that it's
[01:11:07] probably as well taken for a, I mean, no, it is slightly slanted. It's not completely sideways. It's not, he's not centred in the image. There's kind of a, it's white on the back, but there's some blue beneath it. So you don't know if it's a wall.
[01:11:30] He seems suspended in an atmospheric cloud. It's a very small painting. So I guess for me, it's a problem of format. I go to the small paintings and I love them. And he is there,
[01:11:46] kind of like his arms are two lines, the chest, the legs are kind of two lines as well. And then you have the very rigid cross behind, very kind of like two lines, very dark.
[01:12:04] And I love this painting because I don't quite get it. I don't quite know what he's trying to say, but I kind of feel a little thread that I know I can pull and it's going to
[01:12:15] take some time to understand what's going on in this painting. I asked myself, to what extent do the biases you have and the prejudices you have? Because I mean, I really do not have, I haven't had the religious upbringing. I come from a very Catholic country.
[01:12:34] So for me personally, I think maybe that's where, because that second room for me was brutal. The third room was kind of brutal, coming in there and seeing so much religious painting was as a colonizer, which is my history. But on the maybe, I don't know.
[01:12:55] Yeah, fair enough. I mean, the flip side of that is he has sort of the white priest, his father figure, but there's also lots of representations of brown Christianity. So you have the brown nuns. Oh yeah, it's the majority of it, I think.
[01:13:17] Yeah, so there's ownership taken perhaps that he is trying to demonstrate as well. But I agree. And I really like your notion that the bigger paintings are potentially more of a veil than a reveal. And I think that's an interesting idea.
[01:13:43] I think if I were to go again, that would give me a very different perspective with all of the work. But I agree. I think that these small ones are really phenomenal and they felt
[01:13:58] most moving. And I think told, to me, the viewer, the most poignant story. So which one would you take home if you could? Yes, and that's the funny bit. I was thinking as I was
[01:14:15] listening to you, I was thinking it's so interesting, isn't it? That we spoke about liking and disliking. And this is not about liking or disliking. I didn't dislike the exhibition. It was kind of a conundrum for me. And it's so interesting that maybe I didn't connect a lot
[01:14:35] to most of the paintings, but I am passionate. And I'm saying passionate, weighing my words about the cave painting. I was so struck by it. And it may have been that painting that kind of
[01:14:51] ruined the rest of the experience, because I didn't see it at first. And then I went around the room. I saw it up close and then I kept looking at the paintings and I looked back for
[01:15:03] some reason, maybe someone was coming in and I saw it from afar. And I just had the most incredible physical reaction to it. I just felt engulfed, like I didn't feel in the bigger
[01:15:18] paintings by it, taken into it and into the mystery that probably is the religious feeling, isn't it? It's a sense of mystery and miracle and life and death and disappearing the candles that are not providing any light to that hole. They're not lighting it. They
[01:15:40] don't know what's inside. The black behind the candles is abyss black. Absolutely. And you still want to go in. I mean, I felt like I'm going to the mother of mothers and I'm going to go into that hole. And it's exactly what he's depicting
[01:16:01] with the kids, which is what is dangerous is also fun. And you're attracted to darkness as you're attracted to light and you try to bring light into darkness. I don't know that painting, if I could have it, of course he's not after everything I said, he's not going
[01:16:16] to give it to me, but whoever owns it, well done you because that is a painting I would love of all the exhibitions we visited. I think that was one of the strongest impressions.
[01:16:29] Really? Yes, I loved that painting so much and it just made me want more from a single painting, but knowing that the more would have to come from me and not from the painting.
[01:16:47] There's something magical to me in that painting. I just loved it. I would take it home and I would look at it every day. Yeah, it is spectacular. And I mean, again, it's like
[01:16:57] there's that abyss black, but then the candles that are lit are cheerful colors. Like it's this really great juxtaposition of just sort of merrily we go into the abyss kind of feeling. Yeah, and also Bangladesh, that contrast of the carcass and the colors, the incredible
[01:17:26] colors that you probably see in that country. I don't know, it says so much without showing a lot. Yeah, definitely. How about you? I can see that you're looking at your pictures. I am. You're looking at your book. I'm looking at it on my phone with all the
[01:17:44] pictures on it, but yeah, I think it would be definitely Night Swimming, the one we talked about. Oh, yes. That's a lovely one. Yeah, it just like, and I think that is definitely one of the common
[01:18:02] threads in his work is that danger of childhood, you know, that danger of being drawn into things that we don't realize could end us. And also, I think being in the
[01:18:21] context of a very colonial approach to a place that comes from the heart, but that you're in a sort of, you're in a bit of history and your body is a mix of both histories. And you have no idea.
[01:18:36] I think there's also that kind of thing of all the things you ignore as a child and the very pure innocent relationship you have to things. I mean, there's lots of evil and
[01:18:49] cruelty in children, but one thing you can say is that whatever your parents bring to the table, you take it and you don't know where it comes from. And you end up being brought up
[01:19:03] in those values and those beliefs and those whatever, you know, those stories that you're told. And that's why I think the second one I would take is the boy in the canopy bed with
[01:19:14] the Last Supper behind it. And The Last Supper is painted beautifully because it's the exact amount of figures that you need to know exactly what the painting is. And that moment of loneliness and of soothingness of being in your parents' bed, there's nothing like being in your parents'
[01:19:34] bed. There's something a little bit like that cave while you feel the danger because it's intimate, but at the same time you want to be there. It's so nice. The best. It's so good. Yeah. It's the best, you know, whatever relationship we have with your parents,
[01:19:51] there's something about the bed. I mean, sorry, I'm just going to take that back. No idea. Because probably there, you know, there's a few of you out there. You will not feel what I'm talking about because very little is universal. But from what I take from my
[01:20:13] conversations with people, a lot of us feel that relationship with our parents' beds, but probably not all of us, you know, let's face it. But yeah, personally, I really relate to that. And also of being in Portugal in a very dark spaces because it was so hot. My
[01:20:32] parents come from that central region and going back to the family, to the village, and having to be in total darkness in the afternoon because it was so, so hot. And being on those unfamiliar beds with lots of religious imagery as well. Although my family's
[01:20:48] not very religious, but there was obviously, you know, in a Catholic country, you can't escape it really. So that's kind of something that I can, that is in the back of my mind, unnostalgic memory. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, Joanna. This is brilliant. I just feel like,
[01:21:10] you know, just hearing you talk about your experience of the exhibition has given me so much more to think about and it makes me want to go back and see it again.
[01:21:21] And you have the book as well. So you have much more, you have a bigger knowledge. I think that what you said about the presence of that white leader, religious leader, but then in a sort of a calm, serene gathering, a religious gathering in faith around that man
[01:21:46] of all those, of course, brown people who were from there and who willingly were there and found solace in someone else's religion is something that I didn't think about, to be honest, in the show. And I mean, I feel deeply connected to Buddhism, you know, so
[01:22:06] in some ways, you know, I'm guilty of appropriation maybe, I don't know, but it resonates with me. I love it. I go back to it. It helps me. It sustains me. And so nothing
[01:22:18] is in its place in globalization. And when there has been exchanges, some of them violence, some of them less violence, some of them very few with regards to the people you're proselytizing, you know, I don't know, it's a complex matter. And when you're part of it,
[01:22:42] it is asking a lot to someone who's part of both cultures, maybe to at a young age, provides, you know, a very clear entry point for you as a spectator. So that you also you made
[01:22:57] me think of that and it's true that it's a very interesting perspective that he has, you know, and the question of did these paintings and did this religion provide acceptance and solace for him as a grieving partner? The question is not answered. And I like that,
[01:23:18] you know, I think that's very important aspects, not moralizing. It's not telling you what to think. So yeah, I mean, thank you. It was really nice because I kept my resistance to the exhibition a secret because I wanted, you know, I thought it was going to be interesting
[01:23:39] to see, you know, how we could talk about this. And as usual, you bring something to the table that I had not seen at all, you know, so that's what we're here for. That's the beauty of exhibitions and about talking about exhibitions, talking about them exactly,
[01:23:55] because we visit exhibitions so that you have to. So don't forget. Nice working in the tagline there, girl. Like it. So next time we are going to go big with Judy Chicago revelations at the
[01:24:10] Serpentine Gallery. So we are going to be sharing that episode if you have a chance to check it out or if you have a chance just to check out Judy Chicago before that. That's
[01:24:20] wonderful. Obviously, never a prerequisite, but with that, I guess we shall see you next time. We shall see you next time. And Emily, I have to say, I'm really excited about the next one
[01:24:34] because I am eager to go beyond the dinner table, which is what Judy Chicago is known for and to know and to go deep into her work to know it better. So I'm really excited about
[01:24:47] that one. Stay tuned, hang in there and see you next time. Although we don't see you, but we feel your presence. So, you know, we'll see you next time. All right. Take care, Joanna. Bye. Take care, Emily. Bye bye.