Completed Painting: '[dc]circuit 03/Proust'

 

'[dc]circuit 03/Proust', Acrylics, Paper Collage & Mixed Media on Panel,
600 mm x 400 mm, 2026

Here is the third panel in my set of five '[dc]circuit' panels, the full title being, '[dc]circuit 03/Proust'. In this case the literary reference is to Marcel Proust's magnum opus, 'À la Recherche Du Temps Perdu' - in particular, the second volume (of seven), 'A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleure' [1.]. Continuing in the same stylistic mode as '[dc]circuit 01' and '[dc]circuit 02', the rhizomorphically reconfigured cartography here relates to Paris and Proust's fictional resort of Balbec (in reality, Cabourg in Normandy), as well as to my own immediate environment in Leicester. A key element of Proust's novel is his (unreliable) memories of youthful seaside holidays, of illusions inspired by travel in general, and of the emotional impact of rail travel, in particular. It is therefore no coincidence that cartographical references to Parisian railway terminals, the Grand Hotel and Casino in Cabourg, and Leicester's long-since repurposed Great Central Railway Station are all visible in this piece.

The elusive philosophical relationship between space and time are key concerns in all of this 'Deleuzian Cartography' work of mine, just as they are in Proust's writing. It's also fair to say that this panel is just as powerfully influenced by the philosophical modelling of time outlined by  Proust's contemporary, Henri Bergson, as it is by the complex ideas of Gilles Deleuze himself. Bergson's ideas prefigure Deleuze in several respects, and he also offered a subjective/metaphysical account of time as an alternative to the strict Relativity of Einstein's since-dominant model. My own humble intention is not to necessarily take sides with any of these super-brains (or even to claim full understanding of their ideas) but rather, to take delight in the push and pull of their various interpretations/explanations of 'Existence', as they play out in the overlapping arenas of Art, Science and Philosophy. If, as the LED circuit motifs recurring throughout these paintings suggest, a modicum of enlightenment is available, it is still hard-won. Nevertheless, the questions are always far more interesting than the answers, so why not start with the 'easy' ones? 

Of course, it's impossible to think about Proust (or Bergson), without reference to the nature of memory, and how we continually use it to reprocess our experiences within our perceptions in the present. The subjectivity and corruption of our memories have long been noted by numerous writers, thinkers and brain-scientists, and seem, if anything, even more pertinent in an age when increasing amounts of our thinking and remembering are contracted-out to machines. The visual hint toward corrupted pixellation, and gigabyte labelling in this piece are included as nods to this.

As already mentioned, there's yet another strand of possible meaning layered into the colours used in this '[dc]circuit' suite. Superficially, the yellow chosen here seemed a perfect accompaniment to the summery vibes of Proust's reflections en vacances, but is also emblematic of the third reactive stage identified by many of the historical practitioners of Alchemy, in their attempts to manufacture physical gold and/or spiritual enlightenment. This is also true of the black and (nominal) white of the two previous panels. You may be already despairing at my eagerness to overload these paintings with yet more pretentious thematic freight, and the tradition of Alchemy is certainly a complex subject to be casually tossing-in (and one with numerous potential interpretations of its own). However, the relationship between hard science and subjective philosophy do appear to be of clear relevance again here. It's also worth noting that all of my current work seems to come about as much as a result of the books I happen to read during my regular coffee-fuelled local perambulations, as from the spaces I physically inhabit whilst on them. During the gestation of these pieces, this included a history of Prague (an alchemical hot-spot) amongst all the other posh literature and baffling French philosophy. This organic, often random or impulsive, drip-feed of information, and the tangle of mental correspondences it inspires, seems very much in the Deleuzian spirit of energy flows, lines of flight and immanent production - to me, at least. Anyway, I'll try to offer a few more clues about this alchemy business in my next related post...

[1.]: Marcel Proust, 'In Search of Lost Time', Vol 1 'In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower' (Trans. James Grieve), London/NYC, Penguin, 1919/2003

[Sans A.I.]

Proustian Diversion 2.1 (Travel Guide: Painting Remix)

 

All Photo-Manipulations: April 2022

"...the specific pleasure of travelling is not that it enables one to stop when tired or stay somewhere along the way; it is that it can make the difference between departure and arrival not as unnoticeable as possible, but as profound as possible; it is that one can experience that difference in its entirety, as intact as it was in our mind when imagination transported us immediately from where we were living to where we yearned to be, in a leap which seemed miraculous less because it made us cover such a distance than because it linked two distinct personalities of place, taking us from one name to another name, a leap which epitomized (more acutely than by a run in a motor-car, which allows you to get out where you like and thereby all but abolishes arrival) by that mysterious performance that used to be enacted in those special places, railway stations, which, though they are almost separate from the city, contain the essence of its individuality, as they bear its name on a signboard." [1.]

Claude Monet, 'The Gare Saint-Lazare, Arrival of a Train', Oil on Canvas, 
1877, Harvard Art Museums

Claude Monet, 'The Gare Saint-Lazare (Interior View of the Gare Saint-Lazare, The Auteuil Line)',
Oil on Canvas, 1877, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

"Sad to say, those wonderful places, railway stations, our starting-point for a distant destination, are also tragic places, for though they are the setting for the miracle which will turn a land hitherto non-existent except in the mind of into one we are  going to live in, for that very reason, as soon as we venture outside the waiting-room, we must abandon all hope of returning to the familiar bedroom which we left only a moment before. We have to give up all prospect of sleeping at home tonight, as soon as we have decided to venture into the reeking cavern which is the necessary anteroom to mystery, one of those huge glass-roofed machine-shops, such as the Gare Saint-Lazare, which was where I had to seek out the train for Balbec and which, above the great chasm slitting the city, had spread out one of those vast bleak skies, dense with portents of pent-up tragedy, resembling certain skies of Mantegna's and Veronese's fraught with their quasi-Parisian modernity, an apt backdrop to the most awesome or hideous of acts, such as the Crucifixion or a departure by train." [2.]

Walter Richard Sickert, 'St. Mark's, Venice (Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus)',
Oil on Canvas, 1896 (Tate Gallery Collection)

[1. & 2.]: Marcel Proust, 'In Search of Lost Time, Volume 2, In The Shadow of Young Girls in Flower', Part II: 'Place-names: the Place' (Trans. James Grieve), London, Penguin Books, 2002/1919.

Proustian Diversion 2 (The Travel Guide)

 

All Images: West Leicester, March 2022

"But if these names absorbed for ever the image I had of these towns, it was only by transforming that image, by subjecting its reappearance in me to their own laws; in consequence of this they made it more beautiful, but also more different from what the towns of Normandy or Tuscany could be in reality, and, by increasing the arbitrary joys of my imagination, aggravated the future disappointment of my travels. They exalted the idea I was forming of certain places on earth, by making them more particular, consequently more real. I did not at the time represent to myself cities, landscapes, monuments as more or less pleasant pictures, cut out here and there from the same material, but each of them as an unknown thing, different in essence from the others, a thing for which my soul thirsted and which it would profit from knowing." [1.] 

"And, even though the motive for my exiharation was a desire for artistic delights, the guidebooks sustained it even more than the books about aesthetics, and still more than the guidebooks, the railway timetable." [2.]

[1. & 2.]: Marcel Proust, 'In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1, The Way By Swann's'  Part III: 'Place Names: The Name', (Trans. Lydia Davis), London, Penguin Books, 1913/2002