Appearances and Phenomena

Both metaphor and representation involve relational engagements between two conditions; the interest here is the imaginative stretch between these two conditions. Stretch meaning both reach and gap, a lacuna where phenomena surface such that they can be viewed. The figure is the instrument of discovery and knowledge, through our presence real or imagined or through the simulated presence of others or indeed other figures, correspondences direct or vicarious. George Moore painted his Views of Westport House in 1761, some twenty-one years before the Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon facilitated aerial viewing. Moore’s views reveal an unseen landscape, a phenomenon, predicated on the figural agency of the House. His two views negotiate between figure and ground, aspect and prospect, front and back, far and near, presence and absence, with viewer and object in correspondence and presaging later work, notably Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog and Gerhard Richter’s Betty. The spatial sensibility in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is similar, grounded in picture making, figural agency, and the phenomena of appearances. Frank Stella wrote that “the aim of art was to create space, space in which the subjects of painting can live” . That presence and hence figuration spans media and disciplines confirms that existence is spatial, the vital correspondence.