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In Eye and Mind, an evocative essay originally published in 1964, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty explores painting as a form of vision. The painter’s vision, he says, is not an optical relation to a flat surface of points, lines and planes. It is rather an immersion in the depth and volubility of what there […]

Untitled, 2017

In an article on contemporary art I came across an evocative sentence, alluding to art works that “seem to re-immerse the tangibility of memory in processes of erasure and abstraction”. The idea seemed intriguing because we often think about art as doing the exact opposite – making memory tangible by summoning and highlighting it and […]

Introverted Fauves

André Derain – ‘Charing Cross Bridge’ A style whose name was given to it by a critic and intended as a denigration. A loose group of artists who were devoted to materiality, tonality and strong sensory experience. No, I’m not talking about shoegaze, but about Fauvism. But swap “audio” for “painterly” and “sound” for “colour” […]

The Blocks of the World

left: Sean Scully ‘Landline Blue’, 2014.  Right: Sean Scully ‘Landline Grey Grey’, 2014. Oil on aluminium   “I was always looking at the horizon line”, the painter Sean Scully has said about his recent ‘Landline’ series, “– at the way the blocks of the world hug and brush up against each other, their weight, their […]

Soon: Duelectrum

Offering their own interpretation of the introspective evanescence so integral to the shoegaze mindset, Duelectrum seem to barely exist. They are from São Paulo, Brazil, and include Filipe Albuquerque on vocals and guitar, Franklin Weise on vocals and bass, Lucas Lippaus on guitar and Elson Barbosa on drums. Formed in 1999 by Albuquerque and Weise, […]

Continental Drift

I’d read somewhere that a book called Hearing History: A Reader, edited by the promisingly Fall-esquely named Mark M. Smith, explored the distinction between “American sound” and “European sound”. This got me all excited and I chased down the book. Disappointingly, though, it turned out that the relevant chapters were not really about the similarities […]