joseph scissorhands: Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor - The Night Encloses II

"I have an obsession with red. My favourite colour of all , the one I use by the ton, is Alizirin crimson. It's a very dark bloody Bordeaux wine red. What's interesting about red is that it links to black so incredibly easily. Red makes great darkness. And of course one might say red is fully a colour of the interior." - Anish Kapoor.

Installation view

Known primarily for his sculptures this exhibition affords the visitor the chance to familiarise themselves with the lesser known aspect of Anish Kapoor's oeuvre, that of his paintings. It was certainly a side of his work that I was unfamiliar with so I took the opportunity to visit Lisson Gallery for a look. It was a shock to be confronted with a series of visceral, bloody canvases that hinted at ritualistic violence to the body, and landscapes rent by volcanic explosions - themes quite appropriate to this current Hallow'een season. The symbolism of the colours red and black are particularly powerful in the canon of art, and these are the colours that predominate here, executed in a physical, gestural style. I saw stylistic precedences in Kapoor's paintings in the fleshy, muscular works of Francis Bacon, Chaim Soutine and perhaps even those of Philip Guston with their thick, viscous impastoes and dynamic, gestural application. Kapoor even presents one work here (Diana Blackened Reddened) in the form of a triptych, a feature of many of Bacon's works. It is so beautifully painted, but I just kept seeing Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion 1944. The landscape paintings by Kapoor here are interesting in that they resemble the spectacular, apocalyptic scenes we have been witnessing in the media recently in the eruption of the volcano on La Palma. Kapoor's paintings evoke this sensation with ruptured landscapes spilling their guts, and their surfaces of acid yellow paint, and thick, black, lava-like encrustations on the surface of the canvas. One can almost smell the sulphurous odours in the delicate wisps of paint emanating from the fissures in their volcanic forms. Two of Kapoor's sculptures are included here, and both similarly repulsed but fascinated me. They are reminiscent of scenes from an abattoir with metal machinery dripping bloody entrails. Again the piece entitled Side Inside, recalled Francis Bacon's work, being a metal framework hung with a sinewy carcass of blood red silicone entrails. Bacon used such frameworks frequently both as a device to demarcate space within his picture planes, and to isolate his figures. Side Inside is to my eyes like a three dimensional representation of the first panel of Bacon's Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus (1981), with a bloodied, nightmarishly, surreal creature hanging from a framed structure. I'm not sure if the violent and bloody nature of these paintings were created by Kapoor purely for sensationalism to capitalise on the proximity and publicity of Frieze, or were conceived out of a genuine need to vent something dark which had been previously repressed until now, or are possibly a response to the emotional rigours endured during the pandemic, as many of the artworks were created during the lockdown. It doesn't really matter. Kapoor is an esteemed sculptor, and dark as the subject matter of these paintings is, he appears to acquit himself well as a painter too.