Van Gogh...on acid
Konrad Magi (Dulwich Picture Gallery, South London)
Which may strike you as like being France’s fourth best racing driver, a bit, you know, so-so. Mediocre.
Don’t be fooled. Magi is a great painter, his pictures a mix of Van Gogh’s hyper-realism and Gauguin’s supersaturated colour palettes.
As a result, his pictures vibrate with texture and colour, delivering a form of hallucinogenic experience. Look at ‘em for too long and it’s like you dropped acid. Not that I would know.
The show is currently on at Dulwich’s Picture Gallery, a gallery that is on a bit of a roll at the moment exhibiting relatively obscure (to us) foreign artists that upon closer inspection prove to be wonderfully entertaining.
Magi (1878-1926) was that classic thing, the tortured artist who spent his life suffering from mental ill-health, principally depression and anxiety.
However he used his condition to produce highly impactful landscapes and (slightly) weird portraits (more on that later).
Of course, his landscape paintings do speak of a troubled mind. Nobody can see the world as he does without there being, in layman’s terms, a screw loose.
Clouds that bleed pink; rivers and lakes that ooze turquoise and green; landscapes that hum with too much intensity: that’s how he saw the world around him. Hang these pictures in your monastically white living room and after a while the wall will start to wobble.
I mean, I have been to Norway and yes, it is beautiful. But no fjord water looked like that!
It’s Van Gogh on overdrive. And like the more famous Dutchman’s work, despite it being not how the rest of us see our environment, it does makes for terrific paintings.
But unusually for a tortured artist - and unlike Van Gogh - Magi did become successful in his own lifetime (this after a long period of serious artistic poverty), establishing himself as the most in-demand portraitist of his day.
Mind you, his portraits are bizarre as his landscapes. The faces are finely painted, yes, but feature over-large eyes and a skin tone that suggests cholera. Meanwhile the subject’s clothing is frequently pasted on with fat coarse strokes of paint.
It makes for striking pictures even as the sitter tends to look a little nervous, like they’re about to jump up and run away.
Konrad Magi is a complete unknown in Britain (well, he was to me) but this exhibition makes a strong case that this lack of profile is something the exhibition has done well to alter.
Check him out. But maybe bring sunglasses….
