In a time of quarantine and lockdowns, we have looked at and through windows differently - appreciating and re-evaluating their physical and symbolic significance. My house is full of windows - too many of them, I used to think, wanting more space to hang pictures or photographs, believing these to impart more significant ‘views’. Windows bring us light and air but they can do more than that. They have become our 'other' eyes, gazing both outwards and inwards. In these strange times they act as a kind of portal between public and private worlds. To sit at, or peer into, a window is to glimpse, observe, interpret the lives of others.
Rachel Whiteread is a contemporary British sculptor who transforms the domestic and ordinary furniture of life: houses, chairs, water tanks, by casting it in resin, concrete or rubber, making it into something particular, requiring a reorientation of our perception of the familiar. Objects usually associated with a humdrum practicality now take on an ethereal otherness. Her pink resin window of 2010 (Daylight), is a life-size cast of a sash window, comforting in its familiar proportions yet transformative in its colouration and ethereal translucence. It evokes a stillness and almost reverential contemplation as it hovers in front of the wall. Whiteread’s art deals with memory - of lives lived and lost, of objects seen and remembered, both familiar and strange. What has this window seen? Who has looked through it?
“Seeing a great piece of art can take you from one place to another—it can enhance daily life, reflect our times and, in that sense, change the way you think and are.” Rachel Whiteread
Watching a recent interview with Whiteread, I was struck by her acknowledgement of the influence of the great Renaissance outsider, Piero della Francesca, on her work, keeping a postcard reproduction of his Baptism of Christ in her studio. Unknown for centuries, until the early C20th, Piero is now revered for the cool composure of his images and an extraordinarily deft control and economy which together evoke a serene stillness. Even the soft pinky glow of Whiteread’s window seems to have been picked from Piero’s tempera palette.
I was taken back to a consideration of Piero’s work recently on a visit to the New Art Centre at Roche Court, just outside Salisbury. I had eagerly reserved a space to see new work by Tess Jaray. The exhibition was entitled From Piero and Other Paintings. Jaray’s restrained palette and distillations of form have a haunting quality. Devoid of a human presence, they nevertheless seem to scan your progress around the room. Jaray works with an abstract aesthetic, and yet her works in this exhibition both remove and admit human interaction. The once-populated spaces that are reimagined by Jaray are calm and clear - we want to retreat into them and inhabit their tranquility. The cool composure of Piero’s geometrically logical compositions are retained but, far from sterile, these abstractions, such as the suggested light filtered through the six lozenge-like apertures in Virgin and Child with Two Angels, 2019 have a warmth and serenity, qualities once evoked by the comforting presence of the Madonna and her saintly companions.
Looking at the lives of others through windows has a long cultural heritage. One of the first films I watched in Lockdown #1 was Hitchcock’s Rear Window; a strangely prescient account of things to come 66 years after the film’s cinematic release. James Stewart’s photographer protagonist watches and analyses the lives of the inhabitants of the apartment block opposite his own in which he is held physically captive but imaginatively alert. We become lured into the the human stories provided by the fenestrated vignettes, increasing aware that any and each of these inhabitants has the potential to weave a compelling narrative. I was reminded of the word ‘sonder’, defined as the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as our own. Sonder was coined by John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which aims to provide words for unspoken yet deeply felt poignancies.*
A sense of sonder is further evoked, this time from the outside in, by the haunting paintings of social housing in East London by Frank Laws. Laws was born in rural Norfolk but is captivated by the metropolitan housing estates that were created in another moment in history and now almost appear like relics, or ‘Monuments’ that Laws has taken to calling his paintings of them. Often neglected or slated for demolition, Laws pays homage to their role as places of community and self-respect. Working with liquid watercolour, Laws builds up layers and washes of colour and exquisite detail, each building suffused with an often melancholic, Hopper-esque light as we sense the warmth of human habitation despite there being no figures visible through the artificially lit windows.
“I don’t put any people in (them), but the buildings end up telling you about the people, and become characters in themselves.”
HIs reverential approach is amplified by each painting’s framing on the page, echoing the shapes of devotional altar pieces. The one illustrated here recalls Piero della Francesca’s (him again), Baptism of Christ.
During the first Lockdown Laws painted 100 views through windows around the Covid-affected world sent to him by his Instagram followers, each of whom received a lyrical A5 watercolour evocation of the spaces into which they had retreated and looked out from during our enforced isolation. They are beautiful representations of time and place, each special and intimate.**
Perhaps I will revise my opinion of my own windows.
** Frank Laws link
Image credits
Rachael Whiteread - Daylight 2010, Luhring Augustine Gallery
Tess Jaray - Virgin and Child with Two Angels, 2019, Karsten Schubert, London
Frank Laws - Monument V, 2017, www.franklaws.com
Piero della Francesca - Baptism of Christ, National Gallery, London