Looking at paintings is difficult. What makes it especially hard is that we have collectively convinced ourselves that is it easy, that it comes naturally to us, because after all, art is democratically accessible and of universal cultural significance. (Those latter presumptions aside…) we can tend to assume that looking at paintings is no different from watching a film on TV, or looking out of the window on a train journey, or scrolling through Instagram. While each of those other types of looking allow for the possibility of scrutiny, or of zooming-in, or for the flickering of attention between the centre and the peripheries (as are key to painting-looking), in those instances our brains have evolved to comprehend space, action, weather or beauty within constant change by narrativizing the flow of perception which is best received in a state of passive looking. We simply sit back and take it all in, allowing our brains to piece the sense-data together by means of neurological systems for memory, language and wonder.

 

Other more active types of looking require their own idiosyncratic engagements. Reading a map, for instance, is a learned skill which allows for a reflexive understanding of distance, relative location, and topography through a continual translation between landmarks in the terrain and graphic symbols on the plan. Emotions, too, transform the way we look. Consider how our intensity of looking deepens as a sporting contest nears its nail-biting climax. Every nuance of posture or expression in the players, every consequence of the conditions of the pitch or court come into a sharper focus as we become increasingly compelled by the unfolding drama.

 

This exhibition begins an occasional series of projects which attempt to consider why painting-looking is its own special sub-category of looking. Kingsgate Project Space is making these shows because we believe that:

1.  if we each develop our skills for looking at paintings we can get more from the experience

2. museums and galleries are in dereliction of their responsibility if they do not help their visitors learn how to look with care

3. if we collectively lose the ability and motivation to look at painting then we risk paintings becoming meaningless flotsam and jetsam in the symbiotic or complicit cycles of capital, leisure, and status.

 

Some Notes on Looking (part I) includes five paintings made in the past few decades which each portray a figure engaged in a particular type of looking. In Gregory Smart’s Men in Suits (2024-25) scientists gather around a laboratory workbench keenly observing the unfolding of an experiment, watching for the signs that might evidence a breakthrough. The relationship between witnessing and knowledge has its roots in the Enlightenment. Where once we might have believed that such a pursuit of knowledge through close looking ameliorated the need for superstition, we are today less certain that the world is – in any complete sense – knowable. The discoveries of science are as provisional or unreliable as any other kind of truth, and besides, we now have machines capable of a far higher capacity for the calibration of observable phenomenon. The figure in Sophie von Hellermann’s Bird Watching (Modern Love), (2001) is using binoculars to focus her vision on the plumage or silhouette or flight pattern of a bird (outside of the canvas). There is great delight in this ornithologist’s pursuit of the rare or migratory, and in her mental cataloguing of minute differences and variations, each logged against a growing lexicon of birds spotted.

 

Book reading is a particularly strange kind of looking. Tiny curling inky shapes are arranged in rows on paper pages. We watch the almost instantaneous decoding of this array of cyphers in Paul Becker’s Smoking and Reading (2019) where the reader/smoker is visibly transported through complete immersion in the story unfolding somewhere between book, iris and cerebrum. Think for a minute about those incalculable processes taking place in the brain as innumerable synaptic nerve cells pulse chemically or electrically to forge a gripping feeling for narrative, character, place and drama. There is a self-portrait (of sorts) in Timothy Hyman’s Drawing on Waterloo Bridge (1980s) as we witness the painter taking-in the bustling city and attempting to record it in a sketch pad, even as the city itself swells and begins to engulf him. As the painter’s eye roves and searches the vista for details to transform into graphic notation, more and more becomes revealed, and with increasing speed. Drawing-looking is a kind of constant measuring of relative sizes, spaces and energies, and all of these notations are made as a first-person account of the feeling for the act of drawing a thing that won’t keep still, and that constantly has more of itself to reveal. It is, as Tim writes (quoting Red Grooms): ‘… great fun and it’s frustrating too – because there’s so much going on, you’re always so far behind. […] While you’re out there, you feel almost ludicrously helpless.’ Drawing-looking is as much a way of not knowing, of not coping, and such drawings take delight in this bathetic submission.

 

The looking found in Kofi Boamah’s After Rubens’ Susanna and the Elders (2025) is a lecherous, desirous, threatening looking. This story of two men of high standing abusing their position of power to gain sexual favours is the subject of countless canvases in the Western painting tradition. In Kofi’s interpretation the elders’ lusty eyeballing has become embodied, manifesting as chomping mouths, and pawing outstretched hands. The victim of this attack returns their gaze, but this time with a bitterness of equal severity. Lust and desire, envy and jealously are commonly weighed in the scales of public morality and found wanting – something to be chastised or expunged. And yet, they are ways of looking that we each find ourselves tangled-up in at some point on most days. As Rosanna McLaughlin wrote about John Currin in 2022: ‘By letting his twisted libido out of the basement and into the light, his paintings express something of what it is to be human. As a consequence, they connect with a quality once sought-after by painters and latterly much neglected: spirit. A sick spirit, undoubtedly, but a spirit nonetheless.’

 

It is important to point out that none of these paintings are themselves the consequence of looking directly at, and painting from, the motif. They were not painted on location or with the model in front of them. These were each worked-up from drawings or photographic reproductions or conjured from the imagination. Greg’s gouaches are painted from a paused screening of The Man in the White Suit (1951), Tim’s from those drawings made on that bustling bridge. Some Notes on Looking (part II) will deal with how looking works within the act of making, and how that looking becomes encoded into the paintings. For the time being this iteration is concerned with a cleaving apart of some of the different modes of looking that we might otherwise (lazily) presume are each interchangeable. We hope that whilst looking at someone birdwatching or reading (and so on) our viewers might quietly become self-aware that what they are engaged in is painting-looking. And from here their journey of possibility begins. Painting-looking is not the same as slow-looking – regarding which there is a growing collection of writing – but being careful not to rush to a superficial precis of what the painting is ‘about’, or how it might charm us or repel us, or to confuse image with content, is the first step toward getting a feeling for the painting’s synchronicity of image, materiality, language, process, scale, speed (and so on…).