Dennis Hollingsworth

Lil' Baldachin

I keep thinking about Gaudi's Baldachin, which I have seen in Barcelona's Sagrada Familia and Palma de Mallorca's cathedral. Rather than make/build a baldachin approaching the scale of those which I had seen, I decided to make something smaller, something in the order of a maquette. My thoughts are driven by intuition, and the hazard is the caprice of post rationalization. All I should do at the moment is to dump out a few elemental thoughts and try to assemble them later.

- The baldachin had its beginning as a cloth placed aloft that sanctified a demarcated place of worship.
- Gaudi's feral imagination drove him towards a ringed truss that supported painted canvas, wrought iron wheat atop, and pendants of lights. How wonderful.
- This is a primitive architecture. Shelter.
- Canvas projected into space conflates the 2D of painting and the 3D of sculpture. If sculpture is the thing you back into when you step back to see a painting, this could be a series of ringed station points.
- The formalism of my painting has been pointed towards proliferating and enfolding the variety of form that comes naturally to paint. What are the varieties of form that can come from a support?
- Somehow, I hear the call of Buckminster Fuller. Tensegrity, anyone?
- Supports/Surfaces was famously motivated by political revolt and concurrently a desire to push back against the widespread perception that painting had come to a dead end. For me (and I project, for my generation), the political problem of our time as it intersects with the concerns of the art world is the question of how to rise above the stalemate of current binary political opposition... of how to revolt against the ideas of an epoch that made a fetish of revolt... how to see clearly a new world that is operating by new rules few understand. I too wanted to resist the narrative of the death of painting, so I looked for the life of paint itself and have tried to show it to others. Supports/Surfaces pulled the canvas apart from its support, and I wonder what could be done by finding new ways to pull it together?